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Thoughts on Superbike and Sportbike Projects, Project Bikes in General

Posted on Posted in Motorcycles

Here’s the deal:

If you can’t afford to buy a halfway decent motorcycle, one that is complete, one that runs, from someone who has spent the past couple few or more years giving a damn about it as reflected by its current condition and the information they’re willing to share with you…

And you have zero mechanical aptitude, zero experience buying, selling, and working on motorcycles…

You likely cannot afford to have a motorcycle.

Period. End of story.

“Why not?” you ask?

There is no way on this Earth that you can buy a “project” and expect to pay a mechanic to fix everything that’s wrong with it AND end up coming out ahead.

It will be much less time consuming and expensive for you to simply buy a good bike for whatever a good bike costs. This is even more true for really fast motorcycles AKA sportbikes AKA superbikes.

I’m not here to put anyone on blast, so I’m not going to post pics of the whole bikes here. These bikes may still be for sale. After looking at one of them for 15-20 minutes, literally filling up an entire 8.5 x 11″ sheet of paper with everything that’s wrong with it, I said, and I quote:

“I wouldn’t take this bike for free to work on in my spare time with the expectation that I could put it back on the road in a cost effective way.“

The only thing I would want to do with either of these bikes is to part them out on eBay or use whatever good parts remain on them to improve the condition of a bike that’s in much better shape to start with.

So what was wrong with them? Where should I start?

Fork Seals

The black, rubber part at the bottom of the pic is called a wiper. It’s supposed to keep dust, dirt, and grime out of the top of the fork seals, which keep the oil inside the bike’s fork.

You can see there’s a big, lightning-bolt shaped crack in it where dust, dirt, and grime has made its way into the fork seal.

The fork seal has started to leak, as evidenced by the wetness apparent on the stanchion, which is the shiny, chrome-looking part of the fork. With parts this is a $300-$350 job, which is fine if there’s nothing else wrong with the bike. $$$

But wait, there’s more. A lot more. I’m just getting started.

Electrical Issues

  1. Someone didn’t feel like installing a new fan switch, so they wired in their own rocker switch to control the fan. This means you have to keep an eye on your temp gauge in traffic and flip it on and off to keep the bike running at the optimal temperature, which is something that a bike in decent shape that hasn’t been molested by meth heads does all by itself! Imagine that!
  2. These are “unauthorized” AKA INCORRECT connectors that should never be installed on anything that vibrates like a motorcycle does.

Another thing gutter gremlins and junkies do to bikes is they like to cut into the stock wiring harnesses in order to solve problems they’re too zonked out or broke to buy parts to fix.

Figuring out what the fuck they did to the wiring harness and fixing it is time consuming and expensive. It’s time in at $127.5 (bout to be $145) an hour with no guarantee as to how long it will take to find and fix every problem they’ve made. $$$$$

Tires

Tires for sportbikes are expensive, about $350-$400+ a pair depending on who you buy them from.

Mounting them is expensive, too. Most shops will charge you $30-$40/ea to mount and balance them, and that’s only if you show up with the wheels off the bike.

To remove the wheels from your sportbike safely, without breaking anything, you need at least $300 worth of motorcycle-specific stands. And the tools/know how to take the wheels off and get them back on.

Ask any novice mechanic or racer, and they’ll tell you it’s a pain in the ass. I make it look easy because I’ve done it hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times. Nothing about putting new tires on a sportbike, or any motorcycle really, is going to be cheap and easy. $$$$

That’s fine if ALL IT NEEDS is new tires, and that fact is reflected in the seller’s asking price. BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

Exhausts

  1. If you zoom in, you can see where someone twisted some kind of improvised shit from Home Depot or Lowes into an exhaust hanger. Also, not the right hardware (more on that in a minute).
  2. Using worm-gear clamps to secure the exhaust can to the mid-pipe. Surely this will last just as long as the OEM stuff, right? RIGHT?!

That’s a fucking WING NUT attached to a bolt that is both too small (diameter) and too big (length) holding the exhaust can to the hanger. Sure, that’ll work! Yeah right!

I can stick my finger in the space between the exhaust strap and the exhaust can on this one. This isn’t *that* egregious, believe it or not. If the space wasn’t so huge, you could get away with making something to take up the space out of an old innertube or something.

This is too much though, and that exhaust can is going to vibrate and flop around until every fastener holding it to the bike loosens up and turns into tire poppers all over the tarmac.

Some of these parts are incredibly specific, to the point that you can’t even buy them anymore depending on the age of the bike. Making parts is expensive af, and it’s just not worth it on a bike that’s not already in halfway decent condition. $$$$

Brakes

  1. This is the fitting where the master cylinder reservoir hose fits into the master cylinder. If you look around some more in this pic, you’ll see that everything just looks like shit. This is not how sportbike contols are supposed to look, and it’s not how they end up looking if previous owners even remotely give a single, solitary fuck about their bikes.
  1. A hose with a bolt stuck to the end of it is NOT a suitable rear master cylinder reservoir. The hose DOES NOT make a fluid or air tight seal against the bolt’s threads AT ALL.

New parts must be sourced and installed. $$$

Oil

The oil level is over-full on this bike. Maybe because the previous owner didn’t have any stands or another way, like a friend to sit on it, to get the bike sitting straight up and down while they poured oil into its crankcase.

“1” here denotes where the oil level should be. “2” denotes where it actually is. The extra oil will end up in the airbox or all over the bike’s rear wheel at some point. Easy enough to fix, but if they can’t get this right just scroll up and review all of the other shit they also fucked up. If small things like this are wrong, you can almost bet that there are other things that’re wrong, too. $

Chain and Sprockets

I saved the best for last!

  1. Cracked coolant reservoir. This is an easy fix assuming parts are available. If parts aren’t available, a universal aftermarket type reservoir can be fitted fairly inexpensively.
  2. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

Can anyone say “incomplete fusion” for me? Deer turds? And that’s just the weld job on top of the fact that the countershaft sprocket needs to be able to come off in order to change the chain and sprockets, which all sportbikes will need at some point.

Welding the fucking sprocket to the output shaft of the motorcycle’s engine is NOT a good way to fix an output shaft someone fucked up by not having the first clue about what they’re doing. To repair this properly, the engine has to come out of the bike, it must be completely disassembled, and the output shaft must be replaced.

You might as well go ahead and do a complete rebuild while you have it apart. A better idea would be to get a whole new engine that works properly, that hasn’t been monkey-fucked by drug-addled morons and install that in its place. And guess what? NONE OF THAT IS CHEAP OR EASY TO DO YOURSELF LET ALONE PAY ME TO DO! LIKE AT ALL!! $$$$$

Parting Words

I’ve used a lot of vulgar language in this post, more than usual, in hopes that my words will land with the people who need to read and hear them.

I love sportbikes. I think they’re the coolest things on the planet. As such, I find it offensive when people treat them like absolute shit and expect it to be cheap and easy to have someone else fix them.

If you schedule an appointment with me, and it becomes obvious the second I start looking at your bike that it’s a major project that you’ve seriously underestimated, I won’t mince words.

I’ll tell you straight to your face that the bike you have is a piece of shit. I’ll also happily charge you my minimum ($107.5 until May 1, 2024 – more after) to let you know in person, but hopefully this post and these pics and words help you decide for yourself before the thing you have costs you any more money.

If you want to know what a good project looks like, I’ve spent the past 8 years writing about my personal projects AS WELL AS customer projects that went well right here on this very site. Check it out, you might learn something!