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...
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...
Collecting stuff is a disease for which there is no cure. Motorcycles are a favorite collectible, they don't take a lot of room compared to say, military tanks or airplanes , but they do need more space than stamps or buttons . Whatever, if you have a garage, you have room for a few bikes. If you are going to be serious about collecting, you need a theme. You can't just randomly collect stuff you come across, you need to apply discipline lest you be confused for a hoarder. I have pretty much always had a bike collection. I used to collect British bikes when they were practically giving them away in the late 1970's. For quite a while I concentrated on 1985 Yamahas, great bikes that had bottomed out resale-wise when I got them. My first bike I think I paid 50 bucks for. It had been stripped of most of its parts, but it still ran, but not for long. See the theme here - they were all cheap cheap cheap. That first b...
Are those shot gun shells??
ReplyDeleteJust about every kind of shell
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