Worth fixing and worth fixing are not the same thing, and the sooner you make peace with that the better your Sundays are going to get.
Someone is going to tell you it's not worth fixing. Maybe they already have. A mechanic, a friend, a person on a forum who has never seen the bike and never will but has opinions about it anyway. They will tell you what parts cost, what labor runs, what the bike would sell for if it were running perfectly, which it isn't, and they will do the arithmetic out loud and present you with the result like it settles something. And the arithmetic will be correct. The numbers will add up the way they say they do. And it still won't be the point.
The argument this column wants to make is simple: economic value and personal value are different calculations, they always have been, and the only question that actually matters when you are standing in a garage looking at a bike is which calculation you are doing and whether you are doing it honestly. Both are legitimate. Neither automatically overrules the other. The confusion between them is the source of considerable unnecessary suffering, and it cuts in both directions — people who feel guilty for spending money on something that doesn't make financial sense, and people who spend money on something that doesn't make financial sense while telling themselves it does.
This column is not going to tell you to fix the bike. It is not going to tell you not to. What it is going to do is try to give you a cleaner way to think about why you're doing it, because a decision made with clear eyes sits better than a decision made with bad arithmetic on top of feelings you haven't admitted to yet.
The economic argument against fixing an old bike usually goes like this: the repair costs more than the bike is worth. Parts, labor if you're paying for it, your time if you're not, and at the end of it you have a machine that a stranger would pay you eight hundred dollars for. You have just spent more than eight hundred dollars. Therefore you have lost money. Therefore it was not worth it.
This is correct as far as it goes. Where it stops going is at the assumption that the only value in the transaction is the resale value of the finished bike. By that logic you should never cook a meal at home, because a restaurant would charge you less per hour than your own time is worth. You should never build anything or grow anything or learn anything that you could instead have paid someone else to do. The logic is airtight and it leads somewhere nobody actually wants to live.
The senior editor spent the better part of one winter rebuilding a 1980 CB750 that he paid four hundred dollars for and put somewhere north of two thousand into, in parts alone, not counting the Saturday afternoons. The bike would sell today for maybe twelve hundred on a good day to an optimistic buyer. He knows this. He has never pretended otherwise. What he also knows is that he learned more in that one winter than in the previous five years of riding bikes other people had already sorted, that there are things he can now do with his hands that he could not do before, that the bike runs the way he wants it to run because he knows exactly what is in it and why, and that none of that shows up in the resale value because resale value does not have a line item for the education.
"The bike would sell today for maybe twelve hundred on a good day to an optimistic buyer. He knows this. He has never pretended otherwise."
— on the CB750 winter
That is not a rationalization. It is a different calculation, run honestly, with accurate inputs. The output is different from the economic output because the inputs are different. If you want to know whether fixing the bike makes financial sense, the economic calculation is the right one. If you want to know whether fixing the bike makes sense, you need a different calculation, and the first thing you have to do is be clear about which one you're running.
The version we want to warn you about is the one where you are running the personal calculation but telling yourself it's the economic one. This is where people get into trouble, and it tends to get more expensive the longer it goes on.
It usually starts with optimism about parts prices. You look up the head gasket and it's sixty dollars and you think, okay, that's not bad. You do not look up the head bolts, or the cam chain tensioner that you are going to find is worn once you're in there, or the fact that the machine shop is going to find a warped surface that needs decking, or the valve seals that have been weeping so long they have left tracks in the bore. You go in for sixty dollars and you come out having made six trips to the parts store and one trip to the machine shop and you are now explaining to someone who asked a reasonable question why the total is what it is.
None of this is wrong, exactly. It happens to almost everyone who fixes old bikes and most of us have made our peace with it. The problem is specifically the explaining — the energy spent justifying the number in economic terms when the real answer is simpler and more honest: you wanted to fix it, you fixed it, it cost what it cost, and you would probably do it again. That answer is available. A lot of people can't quite bring themselves to say it.
Which calculation are you actually running?: Economic value — what the bike will be worth when it's done — or personal value — what the process and the result are worth to you specifically. Both are legitimate. Pick one and be honest about it. The suffering comes from running one while pretending to run the other.
Do you want to fix this bike, or do you want to have fixed it?: These are different things. If you want the experience of working on it, Sunday by Sunday, figuring it out piece by piece, then the process is most of the value and the running bike is almost a byproduct. If you want the finished bike and the fixing is a means to an end, that changes the calculation significantly, because a lot of fixing is not the satisfying kind. Know which one you are before you pull the engine.
The junior editor has a theory about why people fix bikes that aren't worth fixing, and it is not about the bikes. It is about the specific quality of a problem that has a solution, and how rare that is.
Most of the things that are difficult in a life do not have a clear solution. They have partial answers and compromises and situations you manage rather than resolve, problems that get better and then worse and then different. A seized brake caliper has a solution. A worn camchain has a solution. A float valve that's letting fuel into the carb when it shouldn't — that has a solution, and when you find it and fix it and the bike starts and runs cleanly, something in you registers that as a satisfying and complete thing in a way that most of the day does not offer.
This is what the forum arithmetic misses. The guy telling you it's not worth it is doing one calculation. You may be doing another, and yours may have more terms in it, and the result may be different not because you are being irrational but because you are counting things he isn't counting and you have every right to count.
The bike in the garage right now — the one someone has already told you isn't worth it — is going to cost what it costs. It is probably not going to be worth more than you put in, in the narrow sense. Something else may be true of it, something harder to say out loud at a parts counter or in a forum thread, which is that it is yours, that you chose it, that you know what's wrong with it and you know how to find out what you don't know, and that on a Sunday morning when it's running right there is no version of the economic argument that touches any of that.
Fix the bike or don't fix the bike. But know why you're doing it. The people who are happiest in garages are the ones who stopped pretending the answer was in the numbers a long time ago and just got on with it.
"On a Sunday morning when it's running right there is no version of the economic argument that touches any of that."
— the editors
We received more letters about this column than any other we have written. About sixty percent were people who said they needed to hear it. About thirty percent were people who disagreed, some of them quite specifically, and two of them with their own spreadsheets, which we read carefully and found to be correct in every particular and beside every point. The remaining ten percent were people who wanted to tell us about a specific bike they had fixed or not fixed and what had come of it either way.
We read all of those too. We always do. The specific bike, the specific reason, the specific outcome — that is where all of this actually lives, not in the general argument. The general argument is just the door. You walk through it and on the other side is your garage and your bike and your Sunday and the question of what you are going to do with all three of them.
That part we cannot help you with. You already know the answer anyway.