Brother, that's the kind of support I need to hear.
For MANY and complex reasons, I've been sitting on my best friend's 83 CB900R for about 14 years. The last ten of them I have been trying to get "permission" to have the time to start a full tear-down and rebuild, as it had been left in the elements, not running, etc. and the last 10 years of it in the Reno winters resulted in... well... I'll have to start by sticking a vacuum hose into the cylinders to remove most of the debris...
When we had to sell our house, I decided to just find a cheap little get-around to save $60/week in gas, which I could put towards rebuilding the Honda. I ended up with the Beemer. The wife already has the key in the ignition of the Buy-Back-A-Broken-Bike!!-Bitch-o-Matic 3000, but my leverage is that she is the one who made the final push for me to buy it in the first place. I've been married nearly 20 years and she has n e v e r been willing to ride on a bike. But this... idk what happened but she wanted to buy her own helmet on our way to purchase the bike! Next weekend we went out riding. Unbelievable. The shop is good with me coming down to check out the bike, start her up, etc. I explained the situation to the boss-man, and he is a good dude, particularly for being the only BMW bike shop in Northern Nevada apparently. He did the maint. on it for the previous owner. A brief rundown of damage, from the shop manager, Scott, and the Geico adjuster includes (right side only) foot pegs, hand brake, rear view mirror/turn signal, some damage to the faring that is mostly scraping instead of snapping. One arm of the faring bracket may be a bit bent according to Scott. None of this concerns me as I as already filling and sanding the side panels on the bike, had the hard cases off of the bike for repairing the repairs somebody else had done and then hidden with black duct tape (which is why my leg ended up under the bike... the bags were at home... fortunately it was one of the rare days I had the Fed's laptops and external drives in a backpack, which certainly must have helped break my fall :musicboohoo: )
I've been pricing parts on ebay, at the boneyard, and at the limited offerings from the k100 site. All in all, and mind you I'm not too proud for fiberglass and resin to do the job instead of my paycheck, it appears that getting her back into the shape she was in when she went down will cost somewhere around $300, not including the valve cover (I'm told it's an "engine cover"). I know she didn't hit too hard as I broke her fall. I can't afford to find out a month from now that some control module somewhere was actually damaged, or some mounting point cracked, etc. She's my daily driver. Too much thinking to do for one day. I guess it will depend upon what it will cost me to buy her from Geico, whether or not there is any meaningful damage, and whether or not I can convince the wife of the logic here.
Thanks for letting me ramble, Folks. I haven't had a bike accident since I was 15, stupider, and was driving in the middle of the night with no headlight. Thirty years later I buy a bike I was skeptical of, get to know her pretty well, and then kerplunck within about a month... unbelievable.
I'll let you know how it turns out if anybody is interested. In the mean time, I'm a professional researcher, so if anybody thinks of anything I should know about, particularly as a nooBee-mer, I will be grateful to hear about it.
Cheers.
-B.
P.S.: I do have a rather trivial tech question that I truly can't think of anybody but you folks to ask. I know this thread is for travels, so I will post the question wherever I think it would likely be most at home. My best man, as well as my sons now, are giving me a bunch of crap over this, so let me see what I can gather online and i'll match notes with any input I get here. Thx again.
