|LINK| Download Cafe Racer Mod Unlimited Money
Haldis Momeni
Like Cafe bikes and such. I have done a bolt on build for a friend with a Bonneville and am curious if there is enough of a market to make custom rides and earn a little money on the side. It seems that much of the time these bikes sell for similar money as their unmodded versions so I am just curious if there is enough margin to (mostly) make a decent profit.
If shopped very carefully and you own the tools to mount and balance tires I think you could make some decent side money. Every cheap motorcycle needs tires. Every. Single. One. Which eats up profit margins a bit. Make sure the bike doesn't use some weird size that's tough to get tires for. Don't try to profit off of a Yamaha Radian. They're like the Volvos of motorcycles. Awesome, but no one wants to pay decent coin for a nice one.
Based on what I've seen locally, it would be very difficult to make much money doing this. I doubt the pool of clients who want to pay someone to do bolt ons is very deep... There IS a market for custom fabrication and detail work though. You need to have some artistic and engineering skills and I think the market is likely still small.
As other have said, custom bikes seems to be be a feast or famine industry. A few years ago, there were a lot of shops around doing lots of custom stuff (mostly chopper and bobbers) but they have all mostly folded or radically downsized. I think doing Cafe work is even less viable because while it is presently somewhat popular, it is still not nearly as large a market as the shop built chopper stuff. Secondly, a big aspect of what I see in cafe racers is doing as much of the work yourself as possible.
I think that you can make money. the key is buying well. Like I said above, I just bought a XS400 for $450 with title. it needs a seat and a coil and a few other small items. I could get it on the road, clean it up, make some minor mods with cheap bolt-ons for under $1,000 and probably sell it for $1,500 based on what I see others asking for similar bikes.
The question really becomes "who are you going to sell it to?" A cheap running UJM will always have a place in the world so long as gasoline is available but you're probably best off getting it running and rolling and leaving the bikes stock unless easy modding opportunities present themselves. Example, the stock seat is torn and the pipes are rusted out so it gets a tracker or cafe seat and a set of slip one. Just about any running road legal motorcycle with a title is worth $1000-1500, so keep that in mind as you buy and sell and upgrade as that might be all you can get for bikes no one remembers. Nostalgia usually doesn't bring their wallet with them.
While the custom/cafe train has long left, a nicely restored UJM always seems to pull good money. The key would be buying right, having good sources for clean parts, and being able to do the mechanical and electrical work. That means a lot more than just wires.
This is impressive, as the GH series has been developed and refined based on feedback from professional video shooters, meaning it's one of the only stills/video cameras to offer a waveform display for judging exposure, and it offers a wide range of compression options to get the best-possible footage from the camera. Its image stabilization is some of the best on the market and there's nothing else that offers so much video capability for so little money. Only the risk of autofocus wobble during video shooting (particularly when shooting 24p footage), stopped it winning the award. It's an excellent video camera for a wide range of situations.
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