Buying the same bike twice

[flynrider]

I read all the time when guys are talking about bikes they've owned " wish I had never sold it". How many of you have liked a particular motorcycle so much that you bought another one of them.

I liked my 73 650 Yamaha so much I ended up buying 3 of them. The 73, a 79, and an 81. Something about that paint shaking vertical twin I just loved. Such an elemental motorcycle. A Japanese Bonneville if you will. Oil tight, reliable electronics, but not quite as good looking.

i bought a new 04 Yamaha FZ-1. Fast, handled well, good looking, a little tall for me, but one heck of a bike. I ended up selling it to my son who wanted it badly. Missed it so much went out and found a used 01, same color. Kept it until the CB1100 came along and sold it to my brother to get a CB. Even now when we are out riding together and his is on the FZ, I look at it and wish I had one lol.

Of course I sold the FZ to buy my 13 CB. When the 14 DLX came out I traded the 13 for the 14 so I have owned 2 CB1100's.

I like my ST1300 so much I wouldn't mind having another one of them with low miles on it. Mine has got almost 70,000 miles on it now. They say they will go 200,000 miles but mine is beginning to nitpick me with little repairs. Nothing major, a leaking rad hose I can't get to without tearing the bike apart, a cracked taillight lens that started cracking at a seam a couple of years ago ( there's a replacement sitting on the shelf), and now it seems my rear shock has lost it's springiness for lack of a better word ( that's about $750 to repair plus labor I think). I don't want to be bandaiding this thing along for the next 130,000 miles, and I really don't want a failure somewhere in North Dakota while on a trip.

One of my good friends has bought 5 RD350s, 3 FZ-1s and 3 Kaw Versys over the years and just texted me the other day he found a good deal on another Versys but he had just bought a BMW GSA and wasn't sure if he should buy the Versys. Lol

So how many of you have bought a bike, sold it, missed it and bought another just like it?

I had a similar thing for the Kawasaki KZ 750 twins. They had the same paint shaker qualities as the Yammie 650, but they were solid machines with bullet proof reliability. As a poor college student, another attraction was that they were priced about 1/3 less than the four cylinder 750s of the day.

In all, I owned 3 of the 750 twins (not counting my parts bike). I had a '79 KZ with a Windjammer, which was the first (an only) bike I ever totaled. In '81 I replaced it with a leftover '80 LTD model which I rode for almost 80K miles. When that one was getting a bit worn and shabby (it lived outside), I picked up a used '82 CSR model.

This was my '80 LTD prepped for a 5K mile road trip to Canada in '87.


Here's my '82 CSR on a road trip in '89.


On long road trips the vibration was enough to cause body parts to go numb and parts to fall off due to metal fatigue, but on all my adventures around the western U.S., Canada and Mexico, they never once left me stranded on the side of the road. They were great, simple, reliable bikes.