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The poster was not the actual seller as it turned out. Well, I called the poster (Jon) and got the scoop on the bike. He had posted it for a friend of a friend. I told him what I would be willing to pay for it and I never heard anything more about it so I looked for another bike. A week before I was getting ready to go to Lubbock to get a 78 BMW I bought on eBay and I looked at the posts on the group again. Low and behold Jon had posted another reference about the bike and I called him immediately. I restated my offer and it was the best that had been made and he told me he would relay the information. That is when I actually found out that he had no actual contact with the owner, but rather it was always through the friend. The deal at that time was that if the owner did not have a better offer than what she already had then in two weeks she would let it go for the offer she already had. So in the mean time I made the trip to Lubbock, got the BMW, and stopped in Albuquerque and Phoenix to visit relatives along the way home. When I was in Phoenix I went hiking with my sister and got a call from Jon while I was on a mountain! He told me the owner had accepted my offer and proceeded to fill me in on the details. She wanted cash, I couldn't go to her house, she would let her friend know when the bike could be picked up, the friend wanted a finder's fee, and Jon needed to recover his expenses to pick up the bike. A lot of sane people would have stopped at this point thinking things are a bit too fishy! NOT ME! I WANTED THAT BIKE! So I was to send Jon half of the purchase price and he would put up the rest to give the owner. Now mind you, at this point I have only seen the three photos below and have talked to Jon a couple of times on the phone. A couple of days after I got back from Lubbock Jon got a call saying he could come get the bike. He had to put up all the cash because my check had not arrived yet, but he was ok with that. Jon got the bike, and told me that the owner almost backed out twice because of the emotions that came up since it was her late husband's bike. I think my biker brother (deceased in 1994) and her husband got together in the after life and collaborated to make this work out for me. Jon had to store the bike at a friends until I could get back to Texas to get the bike. Too bad it couldn't have been a week earlier- I was only 300 miles from there! Well, I flew to Dallas a couple of weeks later, rented a truck, drove to Jon's and then went to his friends to get the bike. The second set of photos show the bike in the truck and all of the extra/loose parts in boxes. I had no idea that I was getting all the extra parts that I ended up with. I don't have much history on the bike. From what I can tell by the license tags it was last registered in 1984. That means it was sitting somewhere for the last 22 years! From the looks of it it was not stored inside all of that time. There is a lot of rust and it may turn out that many of the parts are just too far gone to be cleaned up for paint, powder coat, or plating. I have pulled the heads off and the cylinders are still the stock bore and the walls are not scored so I hope to just use a glaze breaker on the bores, clean up and either paint or powder coat the outside. The odometer says 19k and I would suspect that is correct. Too bad it was neglected for so long. I'm off to continue the tear down and see what I can see. |
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