Motorcycles
I have had interest in motorcycles for quite some time. The first one I rode was a Honda Nighthawk in the MSF course my fiancé bought for my birthday one year.
Afterwards a co-worker was looking to sell his Suzuki GS500E which I actually enjoyed riding, even if it was a tad on the underpowered side things (I'm a big guy). This worked out well enough to learn on until we decided to want to ride two up places, and then it demonstrated we needed something a bit larger.
The hunt was on for a cruiser. My budget was a not the largest since I consider the motorcycle to be a frivolous investment, and the wedding was still being arranged. This led me to look for salvage motorcycles that had potential to become nice again.
I found my first Goldwing in Eldridge Iowa, not too far from our home here in Orlando Florida. I have not a clue as to what happened to this thing to cause the damage seen, but it all looked repairable. We won the auction for it with plans to take it to Key West once it became road worthy again.
We loaded up the Equinox for our first road trip together to pickup the bike. The route was nearly 2800 miles and we had 3 days to get it done.
Not long into the trip we noticed there wasn't any tongue weight in the empty U-Haul trailer, and the rattling was driving us nuts. Not sure where it came from, but a bag of cement solved the problem nicely.
I spent the next year slowly rebuilding the bike and getting it ready for us to take on a long trip. The first step was to see if I could get it running. As batteries go, this one was not looking that great.
Turns out that whoever owned this before decided it would be smart to put an electric fence battery in it. Needless to say, it didn't survive.
Once the battery problem was rectified, the bike started right up! This was my biggest fear because I bought it sight unseen without any idea if it actually ran.
Next came box after box of replacement parts. Everything was readily available on eBay or other Honda related sites. In the end the total cost of the finished product was just over $5600 *banghead* This was way over my goal of keeping it under $4000 all in.
I was very happy with the end result. I should have mentioned before that I am not a mechanic in any sense of the term. It was not as snappy as the GS500E, but we could for sure ride comfortably for long distances.
Unfortunately for big bertha here, the Mrs came down with a condition that made riding extremely nauseating (pregnancy). I eventually sold her and bought something a little smaller that I could ride by myself.
I picked up a 2004 Honda VT1100C which I rode off and on for a couple of years. On the test ride it felt ok, but I was less happy with it than I expected. In the end being the daycare transport meant I rarely rode it, and it started collecting dust until I sold it.
Fast-forward ~13 years, the wife decided to let me buy another motorcycle for my 40th birthday present. Being a glutton for punishment I bought a barely running 1990 Goldwing SE with *most* of its parts, and in a state of disassembly.
