things to look for when buying your first machine

After 11 years, I'd like to kick this thread to the top and solicit new input from anybody that has experience buying and then actually riding, (not immediately flipping) motorcycles.

I actually can't contribute much-- I don't remember the details of the used dirt bikes I bought back in the 80s and 90s. I know that none of them were lemons and the only problems that cropped up came after years of intermittent hard use.

Just six weeks ago I bought my first real motorcycle meant for the street, and the first powered two-wheeled vehicle that I've owned in 25 years. It's old-- a 1996 model. I got it from a mechanic who intended to fix it up more thoroughly than he did but he said he just didn't have the time and he was a one-man operation at his shop.

So he sold a cheap. Told me it ran too lean & needed carburetor re-jetting. He'd already cleaned the carburetor in an ultrasonic cleaning vat, changed the clutch, changed all the fluids, and put two new tires on it.

When I took it for a short spin on the day I picked it up, it seemed to work perfectly for the 3 mile test ride but on the 40 mile trip home it started overheating.




He warned me it might because it was running to lean and couldn't be adjusted. It it needed new jets, so now I'm working on that.
But I've made several short trips with it totaling 280 miles in the last six weeks and I'd say the bike is just as the seller described it. I expect that the carburetor jets will fix my "too lean, too hot" problem.

BOTTOM LINE: There are some issues, like overheating, that you would not know when the motorcycles only been idling for three or four minutes and then you take it out on the street for another five minutes and then bring it right back to the sellers home or place of business. It takes a longer ride to find out if it's got an overheating problem.

I seem to have fixed the problem with these 2 steps:

1-- I changed the radiator cap, and the new one is 1.3 bars or pressure instead of 0.9 bar.
(I think that's 16 lbs. vs. 13 lbs, going from memory). It's still within specs recommended per the owners manual.

PS: The new radiator cap has a built-in thermometer, but I'm not sure how well it works if the coolant level drops more than half an inch, which means the hot water will not touch the probe on the inside of that cap.

2-- I ran a bypass grounding switch to force the radiator fan to come on anytime I flipped the toggle switch. And in the 5 months since I did that, I have found that it is helpful to turn the radiator fan on all the time the motorcycle is running even when I'm cruising down the highway 50 miles an hour for several miles stretches. The temp always runs cooler with the fan "on" in such circumstances compared to having just the wind try to blow through the radiator but having the non-turning fan blades directly behind the radiator interfering with airflow.

Other notes:

I flushed and refilled the cooling system back in September but the prior owner had done it less than a year before so the "old" coolant came out nice and clean.

I probably should've tried replacing the temperature sensitive radiator fan switch with a new one -- it only would cost $18 for the part and not much labor.
But I decided to just go with the manual toggle switch which grounds the fan circuit.

I KNOW my in-Radiator temperature sensitive electric switch is defective because I've seen the coolant get up to 220° F and the fan will not come on through its own circuit-- it only comes on when I flip my toggle switch which grounds it through a parallel circuit.