I have 2 brand new, still wrapped and boxed taper-roller bearings that will fit the headstock of any year GS500E/F for sale. No Nipponese, Yang-Bang 2nd rate oh my goodnesse, these are quality nancy boy items, designations 32006X and 32005X.
GS5s are now worth approx 1 bag of sand and are as popular as Chlamydia so it has become impossible to turn a decent profit on one. As a result I have given up dealing in them and no longer require these parts.
.......£10 inc postage (Mainland UK Only).
For nancy boy read....F A G.
Hi Sledge:
I'm curious, so please tell me.. why are GS 500's losing popularity in the UK? I would think that since a gallon of petrol costs a healthy newborn over there it would remain popular. Are folks gravitating toward newer multi-valve bikes, or have they gone cruiser crazy?
Oh no, the sledge is abandoning us.
Say its not so ... say ... say ... bwaaaaaa ....
I think they have gone bicycle and public transit - those of them who have jobs that is.
For once I survived a near 50% cut in my company, and get this, this is the job I hate the most, ever, in my life (OK not true) but atleast 10 years, and worse yet, If I was let go, I'd have made all the GS and other bike parts and made a bit of side $ and created a brand name (dont freaking laugh, the Buddha name has been dragged through the mud, but only on GSTwin).
Cool.
Buddha.
I am not going anywhere, I still have my own faultless and immacualte bog-stock `94 GS5 thats done less than 10K and looks like it has just come out of the crate. For what its worth and what it costs to run I have no plans to get shut of it.........really should put some pics up. What I am saying is that the days of buying and selling GS5s and making a decent profit have passed and if I want to carry on making a hobby pay I need to find something else I can "specialise" in.
The UK and USA markets are drastically different, there has never been a huge demand for 500cc machines here The only people who did buy them were learners and newbies and as soon as they passed the tests or got some experience they moved up to the 600cc class where there was far more on offer. In fact any bike below 600cc here in the UK is fast becoming a rare sight. I like to do a bit of part time bike dealing, nothing big-time, say 8-10 bikes a year. Buy them cheap from people desperate to get shut, tidy them up, fix the problems, get an MOT on it, sell it on aim to make £250-300. GS5s were always popular, over the years I have had about 15 but of late the value of the more popular 600cc bikes like the Bandit and GSXF have dropped and this has pushed down the values of the less popular GS5. I stuggled to make £45 on the last one I sold and considering all the time and effort I put in to it it wasnt worth it. If you have a full license and £750 to spend do you get an early but tidy 600 Bandit or a GS5 thats 2 or 3 years younger?? Put simply you can get a bigger bang for buck now. My local Suzuki dealer had a brand new GS500F in his showroom for 15 months without it selling and in the end he sold it back to Suzuki and made a loss, people would walk right past it and ask where the SV650s and Bandits where.
Of course ebay doesnt help, people dont want to sell on their 10 yr old tatty MOT failures to people like me for next to nothing now, they can make more cash by auctioning them off or taking them to bits in their sheds and flogging them off to the highest bidder. People are now buying bikes like this, running round on them untill the MOT runs out then breaking them and getting 3 times the money back. I would snap this up myself and do the same thing but its too far away from me.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/1992-SUZUKI-gs500-gs-500-e_W0QQitemZ150329119936QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Motorcycles?hash=item150329119936&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A2%7C65%3A7%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318
If I was to be made redundant starting my own Bike breaking business would be a serious consideration.
Quote from: sledge on February 26, 2009, 07:17:31 AM
The UK and USA markets are drastically different, there has never been a huge demand for 500cc machines here The only people who did buy them were learners and newbies and as soon as they passed the tests or got some experience they moved up to the 600cc class where there was far more on offer. In fact any bike below 600cc here in the UK is fast becoming a rare sight.
Well, in that sense things are not that much different, really - lots and lots of absurd/piggish (IMO) 1000CC and up carp, plus the 600 sport bikes, and very little in the smaller end. This (must have bigger and faster) leads to a lot of bikes for sale with a few hundred, or at most a couple of thousand, miles on them - along with "new mirrors" and "a few scratches" - ie, newbies that crashed, scared, going to go around trash-talking bikes and trying to run them over from the Volvo/SUV for the rest of their lives... and in not a few cases they have expensive aftermarket exhausts and such on these bikes they barely rode.
Then there are the ones with a few thousand/hundred miles and the salvage titles, which presumably got more seriously bent, though possibly they just got totaled based on unrealistic prices for plastic - but I avoid them on the suspicion of being bent, and there being little you can do with a bent frame, IMHO.
The GS, despite what you might think if immersed in this forum, is a fairly rare bird here. I don't pay a lot of attention to current production, but there's the GS, a couple of dual sports like the DR400 (formerly 350) and a few 250s like the baby ninja and some baby cruiser knockoffs - after that it's 600 sport-bikes, and up, with a great deal of up.