For some Americans these are the best of times, and for others just keeping afloat is a daily challenge. For many of us working stiffs the lack of funds was the biggest hurdle to owning our own scoot. Too often we hear good bros say they bought brand X,Y or Z because they just couldn’t make the price tag attached to a sharp chunk of American iron. It just doesn’t have to be that way. The lack of big bucks is not an obstacle to a classy ride. It’s a defeatist attitude. Any man can put together a tough ride on a budget, one piece at a time.
We sat down with our local trash to treasure expert, Tim, a “scrapper,” who owns Negotiable Parts Inc. He buys and sells parts every day. We asked him to tell you, the readers, all about the junk parts biz.
—Kit Maira
Everybody buys used parts. One of the first major bike builders I traded with was Jesse James. He called me about some belt drives and it started as a trading thing, not a money thing. He had a lot of parts in the back room, stuff that he took off of other bikes to put his parts on, or stuff that they were experimenting on, prototype stuff, and it was just a cool thing. At the time he was coming up and getting real famous. I would take my son Tim over, and it was like Christmas, with toys, prototype stuff like the bicycle, he would trade us, all kinds of stuff, and I would take it to the swap meets. I gave him a really nice Panhead once, original, and it sits in his showroom now. Over the last ten years I’ve given him half a dozen bikes.
Billy Dodge introduced me to Eddie Trotta in Daytona Beach. I started going to Ft. Lauderdale to clean out his back yard. The last time I was out there, there must have been fifty sets or more of Big Dog pipes. He would put his pipes and other parts on the bikes for the customers, and throw the other parts in the back room. There was a treasure trove of Bourget stuff, that you could only get with a Bourget bike, all kinds of high dollar scrap, I call it, but if you went to buy it, it would be big money. I’d take it straight to Daytona and sell it at a swap meet.
I have dealt with Chica for years, selling him cool stuff, and he now calls me to come pick stuff up. The trading thing seems to work better for everybody. They have parts they don’t use and don’t have time to sell, and that’s what I do. I get them what they want and trade ‘em.
A lot of the manufacturers have new models, and they aren’t building the old ones, so they end up with excess inventory from the old bikes. We buy it for 20 percent of what they paid and sell it for fifty percent. A lot of it is new stuff, or might have a small scratch on it. They accumulate big piles, so they call in two or three of us scrappers and we bid on them. It is a big write-off for them. When we resell it, the customer is saving at least fifty percent.
This is where choppers came from in the beginning. Riders didn’t have money, so they would cut, weld and grind, did whatever they could to make anything work. They didn’t just walk into a custom bike shop and buy a part. For guys, who rode all the time, it was a way of life thing. They still do it today, people come here because they can dig and find what they need, and even if it is not the correct part, they take it and make it work. If they can pay $20 here instead of paying a hundred or two hundred for a new part, why wouldn’t they?
I have plenty of customers who don’t have money. They can’t afford to buy the part and have someone else put it on. A lot of guys who come to me, are broke, but they really need this part. So I’ll tell them, what do you have in your garage? Let’s trade.
That is how it started with Billy Lane, trading with him. The first time he came into my place in Daytona he asked me how much I wanted for a springer front end. Instead of telling him a price, I asked him what he had to trade. One time I was down there, there were twenty people in his front room waiting to get an autograph. I had my big truck full of parts and Jen the secretary asked me to pull my truck out back. Next thing I know Billy is in my truck digging, while all these people are in his shop waiting to see him.
Parts are an important thing to these guys, who are building stuff, Chica, Billy, Bandit, even Jesse. I have traded with them a lot, Knucklehead, Panhead, old hard to find stuff.
“There are a lot of guys like me buying up old parts and selling them. Paul Bethell up in Fresno has tons of stuff for newer bikes like Big Dogs and Indians. He also has a lot of old stuff, but he doesn’t sell the old parts. I probably sold him a hundred motors in the last ten years, but if you ask him if he has a Panhead motor he’ll tell you ‘No.’ But you can buy a brand new chopper, he built from parts he bought from Indian and Panzer and other companies that went out of business. He regularly buys companies that go belly up, which is what I try to do too, but he does it on a bigger scale than me.
There are many people like us around the country, Bud’s in Texas, Moon’s Cycle Repair in the Midwest, Billy Shotgun in Ohio, Joe Lupo in Daytona and Milwaukee, and others.
“Parts trading on eBay auctions is definitely the happening thing, it is taking over the whole swap meet scene. There are other ones too, like Craig’s List, George’s Antique Motorcycle Trader… people buy and sell parts on these lists every day. Also, swap meet forums like www.choppersandpunkrock.com, are filled with old builder dudes that have been around for years, like Irish Rich, Fabricator Kevin, Chopper Dave, they all go on there.
You have to fill out an application to be accepted. People from all over the world go on that site. It has a tech board as well as the board for exchanging parts. There are a lot of people there who have been around for a long time. It is a good place to get advice.
Buying and selling at swap meets is still a good way to go, but sometimes, for the vendor it has been hard to even cover the vendor spot costs, and I think the Internet has a lot to do with it. I don’t know how many times I have heard, “Why should I pay $100 when I can buy it on eBay for $50?” One day I heard some guys say that they couldn’t believe that swap meets were still happening now that there is eBay, and it clicked with me, now I am selling parts on eBay. The buyer can sometimes end up with real bargains buying on auctions. If the item is listed with no reserve and you bid $10, and nobody else bids on it, you own it.
Still there are cool swap meets all over, in California, Arizona, Denver has a big one every year, Chicago, New York, Daytona, they are all over the country. Not everything is a bargain, though. At a lot of the vintage swap meets same guys set up, year-after-year, with the same parts priced high. It is almost as if they go to show off their parts. I guess it’s just like fishing. They are waiting until the right guy comes along with the big candy. When the dealerships show up at the meets blowing off stuff like crazy, it’s always cool to see them blowing out the late model stuff.
With eBay, instead of going to a swap meet and dealing with a few thousand people, you are dealing with millions of people all over the world. It’s a beautiful thing. We seem to be doing OK and are steadily selling stuff. I used to buy piles of parts at the swap meet, and turn around and sell them at the shop. Now I call my eBay guy, he takes pictures and that afternoon we have them on eBay.
“Of course there is still an advantage to being able to handle and look at a part at the swap meet, where on eBay you look at a picture so you have to rely on the reputation of the seller. Another thing you have to consider si shipping costs! A lot of people charge a lot for shipping and handling. Sometimes that charge might be more than the cost of the part. You also have to be careful, I have heard of some people getting ripped off. A friend just transferred $20,000 into someone’s account for an ’03 Fatboy and now the guy has disappeared. To protect yourself Paypal is supposed to guarantee a safe transaction. Most of it is legitimate; we do a straight up thing and get positive feedback every day.
One important thing for buyers to consider, whether buying on the Internet or the swap meet, you need to know what fits what. There are swap meet guys out there who don’t know, they’ll respond with, “What kind of bike you got…Softail? Yeah that’ll fit.” That’s the guy who doesn’t pass out the business cards. The customer really has to know what they are buying. When you can, bring your broken part with you so you can match it up.
The Internet is the way to go for me. Instead of loading ten tons of parts and dragging them to the swap meet, I pick the parts, the mailman picks them up and I don’t have to kill myself loading the big truck all the time. “Still, I don’t think that swap meets will ever go away. I like to go to them just to deal with people straight one-on-one. It’s a good place to buy, and it’s also a social thing. I do the swap meets when I need to make some money to pay my rent. I don’t buy too much anymore. I go to sell.
Tim is the owner of Negotiable Parts, 3651 Oakley Ave Riverside, California. The phone number is 951-683-4304. He also runs an eBay store at stores.ebay.com/califswapmeet
