I pulled a side cover off a bike in the club car park last month and watched a crack run clean across it just from the pressure of my thumb – not dropped, not cracked in a crash, just thirty summers of Perth sun finally winning an argument with a piece of ABS plastic that was never built to last this long outdoors. The owner was more surprised than I was; he’d never touched that panel harder than a light wipe with a microfibre cloth.
Category Archives: Buying & Keeping
Insuring a Modern Classic: What Owners Get Wrong
A club member out near Georgetown wrote off his ’97 Valkyrie in a low-speed parking lot tap-up last year — cosmetic damage, bent forward crash bar and a cracked fairing panel, nothing that looked catastrophic. His insurer totaled it anyway and cut him a check for $2,900 based on actual cash value, on a bike he’d spent four years and probably $6,000 in parts and labor bringing back from a barn-find condition. He didn’t have an appraisal on file, didn’t have an agreed value endorsement, and found out the hard way that a standard policy doesn’t care what you put into a bike, only what a depreciation table says it’s worth on paper.
Buying a Used Tourer: The Inspection List
The seller had the bike parked nose-out in the shed with a beach towel draped over the seat “to keep the sun off,” which in twelve years of buying and flipping used tourers around Mandurah I’ve learned usually means one of two things: a genuinely fussy owner, or a seat that’s been patched and they’d rather you didn’t look too closely before you’ve fallen in love with the rest of the bike.
What a Flat-Six Cruiser Is Actually Worth in 2026
I bought a rough 1999 Valkyrie out of a garage in Round Rock last spring for $3,200, put about $1,800 into carbs, tires, and a fork seal job, and listed it two months later expecting something close to $7,500. It sold for $6,100 after three weeks of silence, and the buyer’s opening line was that the standard price guides had it listed “somewhere in the low fours to mid sixes,” which is not a number, it’s a shrug. That gap between what a guide says and what a bike actually clears is the whole problem with pricing these things in 2026, and it’s cost me real money more than once.