I found this bike on Ebay in the fall of 2003. I emailed the owner and bought it sight unseen. My girlfriend and I drove to South Carolina from Wisconsin to pick it up. Why? I guess I wanted to do something besides homework. I got down there and, as is typical with this sort of thing, I found that the bike, which was advertised as running perfectly and having no damage other than the the plastic, was not as nice as described. It would not run without being pulled behind a truck and had some other problems. I bought it anyway. Besides those problems, it also had 45,000 miles (bad) and a D&D slip on (good) and stainless steel brake lines (good).
When I got it home from college a little while later, I started looking for a headlight and plastic. I bought a headlight, lowers, and half of the upper on Ebay. I bought a Lockhart-Phillips windscreen, Progrip grips and Emgo mirrors from CycleTech, the local bike shop (www.cycletech.com). I bought the other half of the upper at Suter's Speed Shop. I picked up a Sunstar rear sprocket that was up two teeth for more torque from a classified ad at www.stuntlife.com.
I rode the bike for much of the summer, encountering a frequent problem. The bike would sometimes not start after being parked. It's not that it wouldn't run, but it wouldn't even crank and the lights were all very dim. After getting tired of push starting the bike, I did a little research and found that it is common for rectifier/regulators to go bad in these bikes. With help from Mike at Cycletech, I checked and replaced the rectifier/regulator and the charging system was working again.
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