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Jan 2, 2013
This is the End
The bottom of the last chapter from 6 months ago asks “…
Will the Triumph be finished? I believe it will. I don’t think I’m going to keep it, when I compare the modern Kawasaki to the vintage Triumph I now believe having a reliable motorcycle to ride on the highway in addition to having a race bike is worth letting go of the magic I once felt about this 650 Triumph. Of course as Curly in City Slickers said “The day ain’t over with.”
So, we’ll have to wait and see how all of this ends, but for today I will share some pictures of what we’ve been doing.”
Well it has finally been finished! The mechanic up the road kept working and working on my race bike, on all the other projects he had going at the time and he also kept working on this Triumph. The progress was slow, and I had near constant doubts that anything on either front would end well – I’d never have the race bike, and this Triumph would languish in his shop forever.
Then suddenly… he was done. With both! Within a week, we had the race bike running and the Triumph was running too.
Unfortunately the lottery gods did not smile on me and I had no other resources to pay for the race bike than to put the Triumph on the auction block. The first eBay listing was a failure, due to some mistakes I made trying to up the ante, but within a couple of days of the second listing I negotiated a sale to a fella in Australia.
How do I feel about shipping off the beautiful finished bike without having ever ridden it? Quite melancholy. I can’t risk wrecking it on one of those infamous ‘last rides’, so in the shipper’s trailer it goes with less than 5 minutes of run time, none of it with me on the saddle.
In the pictures below you can see the finished bike and the success I’ve had with the race bike – The smile on my face is telling, I suppose, but I’ll not be smiling when I load the bike in the shipper’s trailer tomorrow.
Happy ending? Overall, yes. Thanks for riding along with me.
