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Imagine that you are six years old again, only this time you have the worlds biggest sand box to play in, and much better toys....

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A new era

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This year I officially became a 'senior', or 65 years old.  So the 60's have been a lot more fun than the 30's, but there are also some indications that things are going to change.  Take last summer, I was riding my KTM 640 Adventure down a quad trail by myself.  The front wheel fell into a deep rut going up hill and down I went.  No biggee, except I couldn't pick the bike up.  This had never happened before.  I have dragged that bike out of mud and sand on its side, and picked it up numerous times.  This time it was staying down, and I was not even sure why.  With the help of a nearby fisherman I was able to get the bike up and out. So, no more solo off road excursions, the reason I still had the KTM, which truth to say was never the greatest highway bike. Since I started riding well over 40 years ago, I have always been more interested in performance, not necessarily all out extreme by the numbers performance, but motorcycles that did someth...
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A tale of two XTs

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Over the years I have almost always had more than one motorcycle at a time, but never really had a collection.  Collecting stuff has a lot in common with activities like recreational drug use or gambling, it can be fun, but watch you don't get hooked.  In my case the wake up call arrives when I can't get into the garage anymore, and then it's 'everything must go!' until the garage is empty.  After which, like coat hangers in a closet, a bike creeps into a corner, and another and another. The collecting bug does not discriminate, people collect all kinds of shit, from buttons to military tanks. I never saw my random moto acquisition binges as an investment, I was mostly sucked into buying old bangers through the motorcycle price-age curve, a tool used by economists to study the demand for rusty old crap. As you can see in the graph below, the actual selling price of a motorcycle descends very swiftly the moment it leaves the showroom, mostly because the dealer...
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Decline and fall

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Most motorcycle manufacturers have come and gone.  Pick your favorite defunct moto brand, google it, and surely you will find that someone has written a book all about the reasons no one is making them anymore.  But really, every motorcycle brand failure can be attributed to two reasons, people lost interest in buying them and or their makers lost interest in building them. When it comes to why consumers buy motorcycles, this too can be broken down to two reasons, they want affordable basic transportation or they want a motorcycle for fun.  Because most motorcycles are road legal, motorcyclists can combine practical transportation and fun, or at least that is what they tell their wives, mothers, husbands...   There is a (much) smaller market of motorcycles for commercial, police, or military use. Motorcycles started out with the marriage of the safety bicycle invented in 1883, with the high speed small gasoline engine, invented only a few years later. It is es...
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