Bike prices drop but parts get dearer. My wife's Yamaha Diversion cost £4,000 new. Now we would be lucky to get £500 for it. I recently turned one down at £250. Yet a new exhaust for one is more than £1,100.
A fairly extreme example but that's the way things are heading.
Hard to see how things could go any other way I think.
We already suffer from quite a lot of poor quality replica parts for older machines, because we want what
we regard as 'affordable' for what are low volume production runs. Affordable to the purchaser necessitates low manufacturing costs in faraway places. Quality isn't the number one priority, if it's even a priority at all. 'Affordable' to a quality supplier may well mean unaffordable to us.
Ask anyone responsible for parts manufacture and supply for the one-make clubs with dedicated spares operations how they're feeling: it is getting harder and harder. Fewer and fewer small-batch producers are still going; costs through the roof for energy, business rates, hiring staff and training them, machinery costs and maintenance, constant government interference, you name it. It's enough to destroy the will to live.
If volumes reduce further (which I am sure they will), then costs must climb to compensate, or those who are currently still in the game will have to drop out entirely. If Andy Tiernan is feeling the pinch, per Rex' comment, then imagine you are scratching a living making, say, camshafts?
I'm not in favour of stockpiling - my kids dread it every time they look in the shed as it is - but it's hard not to be tempted when the opportunity arises if we are to maintain decent mileages on classics. In the past 4 or so years I've reduced from somewhere around 12000 miles a year on a mix of old bikes (only 250 miles a week after all) to more like half that, but even so . . . To do a mere 500 miles a month year round, parts are needed regularly to cope with normal wear, and mishaps and mayhem can make it a lot worse.
You cite the cost of a Yam Divvy exhaust system Black Sheep - and yes, it's not untypical. My XJR has had downpipes and a couple of collector boxes over the years (now in stainless luckily, after-market, no more mild steel original bits thanks) and those alone are worth a goodly % of the value of the scruffy beast itself.
I think we're going to see a spate of classic machines broken up for parts - like in the old days (and as for accident-damaged modern machines). I'm already seeing some of that here in France, where - despite prices holding up better than in the UK so far - there are complete and perfectly sound project bikes going for spares as owners try to pick up enough £€$ piece by piece to fund other builds or pay other bills. Maybe we've had our 30 or 40 years in the sun after all. I'd be very depressed were I a stripling of 40 - but it's more a question of resignation with an extra 30 years under the belt.
