Buying Time, but No Sellers

Winter isn't over yet, so I'm not counting myself out but it's not looking good. I'm on the hunt for a cheap, low mileage Yamaha WR250X. They were out there last winter, but I hadn't yet committed myself to the idea. Now, I'm there but the bikes aren't.

It's not that there are no WR250X's available, it's that they've all been gaywadded-up by idiot kids. Take, for example, this Craig's List mess:

"Yamaha WR250X supermoto!!!

"2008 wr250x has about 3750miles. really fun to ride all street legal from factory. FMF exhaust, FMF power commander, has digital camo decals! willing to trade towards polaris iqr or skidoo rev"

The price is ok, $3500. But a new WR250X liists for $6,490 and I've found 2009 models at dealers for as low as $5500. Deducting the usual 30-50% for a used bike, that means I am expecting to pay $3850 tops.

Look at that bike. Loud pipe, half-assed aftermarket electronics, and the gayest paint job since Liberace's rhinestone piano. Of course, the kid owner didn't keep the stock pipe and isn't sure he can find the Yamaha electronics. So, taking off $500 to clean up the body work, $250 for the electronics, $250 for the pipe, at least $500 to have to fix all that crap, and $500 for the 3750 kid no-maintenance, high-abuse miles, My opening offer was $1850 and that wasn't even enough to make it worth calling the fruitloop. Come on, if you're going to trash a bike, at least have the common sense to total it into a wall and save yourself the embarrassment of putting it up for sale and displaying your bad taste to the world. Putting pictures like that on the web is like bragging about your skid marked shorts on Facebook.

I have a line on a bone stock WR with 300 miles in Iowa. I haven't seen pictures yet, but the price is right and the distance isn't too awful. Maybe this weekend, with a little luck.