Shadowlz posted:

gently caress firearms safety compliance course. I'm not really huge on that proper license poo poo either. Chances are I'm going to register it under someone else's name.

Linedance posted:

definitely sign up for a firearms handling and safety course with your local gun club first.

builds character posted:

buy a superduke, electronic control will keep you from dying until you get used to it. Great for highway or city riding, carves up twisties really nicely, is the one true chosen bike of CA. Then, when you've ridden that for a while and are ready for a real bike go get an aprilia rsv4r.

edit: you can register it under my name. np.

AncientTV posted:

You get this for free, but the jaunty man will always be riding pillion while making that face:

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

No, but seriously...
Can someone please find me a loving Yellow RSV4 already?

Solvent posted:

backpedally

Razzled posted:

Guns are cheaper, I recommend sucking on the barrel of a glock and pulling the trigger

Solvent posted:

Not going to die, unlikely to crash unless I get hit by someone else truly stupid.

Solvent posted:

cursedshitbox posted:

You should have a try at riding through Atlanta sometime.

I'd highly recommend MSF. if not, hey, its your rear end, not mine. I hear flip flops and boardshorts are adequate protection too, ontop of gixxahs being best around.

Solvent posted:

HenryJLittlefinger posted:

Is there a term for asking for advice with the full intention of ignoring all of it?

captainOrbital posted:

Goon-in-a-well?

Solvent posted:

Thanks for all the advice.

I was halfway serious asking goons and all.
The great thing about this forum is you know you'll get people who'll happily give you the worst, slanted advice, some sarcastic suggestions, and the one or two people who will say something useful.

For the record, I'd tour on roller-skates before I tried leaving town on an electric bike.

Not a fan of firearms. Not going to die, unlikely to crash unless I get hit by someone else truly stupid.

The story of the legless rider was slightly more entertaining than just that. I was sitting in traffic with my friend (who said I should get a CBR), when we saw a small pack of squid on bikes ride through, doing something like 30 in the aforementioned 10-15 mph stop and go.
There was one guy in the back trying to haul rear end and catch up to his pals, and he slammed into the back of a truck that decided to change lanes with no signal. Right in front of me no less. Exciting stuff. The bike crumpled and he slid easy away from it, over into the lane next to me. That was the lane with the lady in the SUV. After, he did a sit-up, looked at his floppy meat pants and laid back down.

I remembered watching him approach thinking "that guy is gonna crash".

For the record, I think I was half awake and asking for advice on the level of a better OP maybe?
400+ pages, you know. Maybe it's time to make one.

Seriously though, I am gonna buy a bike in the next few months. This is preliminary research, and I'm not scared of buying something with too much power, as much as I am buying something that I'm gonna feel uncomfortable on after a little while. I liked the upright idea, it seemed like leaning forward would cramp a bunch of different important places on my body.

Another shorter story, the bike I had as a kid? I let friends ride it, three dumps and it was toast. I remember the last one looked mad when I was yelling at him covered in road rash. "But I'm hurt!" "Look at my bike you rear end in a top hat, it's not going to heal - you will!" I never did anything stupid with it other than that. When I first got it running, I watched a friend rear it up and fall over with it in the grass of the back yard. I remember thinking "I'm not going to do that".

I never did, and I'm not likely to now.

I just watched another friend get smashed and ride home from my birthday party like its was no skin off his rear end. If that rear end in a top hat can ride, I'm not terribly uncertain of my chances. I don't do clearly stupid things for no reason. I'm not interested in wheelies, getting chicks, drunk, drunk chicks. I'm interested in something with power enough to not get bogged down in a highway, nimble enough to do what I want it to, and the kind of range that will let me take it on a late night ride up to LA without a significant pain in my balls.

Any suggestions, jokes or not, are still welcome.
The new thread title sounds like a good one, pair it with a new OP.

If someone in the San Diego area wants to pm me, I'm down for real goon advice of the type I can get from a person standing right in front of me. I'll buy you lunch or something. Thanks again.

Solvent posted:

Not going to die, unlikely to crash unless I get hit by someone else truly stupid.

Solvent posted:

I'm not scared of buying something with too much power, as much as I am buying something that I'm gonna feel uncomfortable on after a little while.

Solvent posted:

I watched a friend rear it up and fall over with it in the grass of the back yard. I remember thinking "I'm not going to do that". I never did, and I'm not likely to now.

Solvent posted:

I just watched another friend get smashed and ride home from my birthday party like its was no skin off his rear end. If that rear end in a top hat can ride, I'm not terribly uncertain of my chances.

Solvent posted:

I don't do clearly stupid things for no reason.

Solvent posted:

Any suggestions, jokes or not, are still welcome.

Solvent posted:

I'm interested in something with power enough to not get bogged down in a highway, nimble enough to do what I want it to, and the kind of range that will let me take it on a late night ride up to LA without a significant pain in my balls.

Solvent posted:

I could pimp lock brakes if I had to,

Solvent posted:

Rev. Dr. Moses P. Lester posted:

What does this mean? Is this millennial slang?

Sagebrush posted:

get a Ninja 250

e: because the rest of my post is sarcastic, you may think that I'm being sarcastic here too. I am not. A Ninja 250 is the ideal starter bike for you and anyone else who weighs less than 250 pounds. It's small, light, cheap, nimble, has no problem keeping up on the freeway, and you can push it to over 200 miles per tank, which is a lot for anything short of some extended-range giant cruiser. Go buy one of those and sell it in a year for exactly what you paid if you want, but don't start riding on something stupid.

M42 posted:

Are you talking about newgens? Pregens are like $1200 (800ish quid) here. Aside from the out-of-touch dealer pricing, obviously.

Solvent posted:

and the one or two people who will say something useful.

Solvent posted:

400+ pages, you know. Maybe it's time to make one.

Solvent posted:

Not going to die, unlikely to crash unless I get hit by someone else truly stupid.

Seriously though, I am gonna buy a bike in the next few months. This is preliminary research, and I'm not scared of buying something with too much power

cursedshitbox posted:

You should have a try at riding through Atlanta sometime.

HenryJLittlefinger posted:

Because German is the appropriate language, I get dusselimbrunnen.

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

No, but seriously...
Can someone please find me a loving Yellow RSV4 already?

Coydog posted:

Well, now I just feel all battle hardened and trial by fired. BORN IN IT. MOLDED BY IT.

M42 posted:

Are you talking about newgens? Pregens are like $1200 (800ish quid) here. Aside from the out-of-touch dealer pricing, obviously.

Angryboot posted:

Here you get this pic for free too (just finished cleaning it before loading it in the trailer for track):

Renaissance Robot posted:

I'm talking 2007—2010 reg, with which the market is flooded at the prices I mentioned. Pregens don't seem to be available at all.

Z3n posted:

Alright, settle in, because this is gonna be a long one.

Motorcycle Purchasing by Evolutionary Jump

So, you're looking to buy a new motorcycle. You've got some amount of experience under your belt, you're ready to take the leap and spend a decent chunk of cash on a bike. Or, you've got a motorcycle, and you like it, but you're looking for something different. Setting aside the cosmetic preferences, because those are always deeply individual, it's important to realize that motorcycles are essentially pretty simple machines, and have only had a handful of major evolutionary jumps in the last 4 decades or so. In fact, they're so simple, we can roughly divide the progress of motorcycles in to 3 groups.

The Universal Motorcycles

Starting from the beginning, you can take any motorcycle that was made roughly pre-1985 as having a welded together pile of hot garbage for suspension, frame, and engine. They might have made a reasonable amount of power, and had some scoot for the time, but they didn't handle well, they had tires that no modern bike would be caught dead with, and they can be broadly defined as "terrifying" to ride fast, as they headshake, flex, and wobble their way through the corners without significant assistance. Your UJM fits in this catagory, generally and across the board. These bikes are great if you're into tinkering, you don't care overmuch about speed, reliability, or performance, and you like a motorcycle for the experience of burning oil, learning the tricks of your carbs, getting the starting sequence just right, and a collapsing suspension waveform reminiscent of your grandparent's Caddy every time you hit a bump. These sort of bikes can be rather fun (I, after all, willingly took on a CBX project), but you'll drive yourself crazy trying to make it something it's not. At best, you can push these bikes towards the next evolutionary period, or buy ones that were on the forefront of performance, like the GSX-R1100s.

The Suspension Wars

The Suspension Wars started after Kawasaki gave up on absurd anti dive systems and folks started to understand that targeted rigidity in a motorcycle frame was a very good idea. A number of things combined to raise the bar in these years, which roughly stretch from 1990 up until the late 2000s. This was the start of real cartridge forks, which are notable for having a compliant reaction to large bumps while also being tunable to manage suspension dive at slower speeds. This period also heralded the start of real tire technology, where all of the sudden you could pitch a bike around a corner significantly faster and more aggressively than previous. The characteristics of bikes from this catagory are primarily found in 17 inch wheels, running a 3.5 inch front and at least a 4.5 inch rear. This was also where the horsepower game started to proceed a little slower, and the racing classes started to form into coherent 600 and literbike classes. The early bikes from this age are the Kawasaki ZX-6E, the Honda 929, and the big 4 literbikes and 600s starting in roughly 2000. This tech also started to trickle down to the standards and other bikes, or get robbed from the faster stuff and refitted for use on those bikes, which now had the baseline frame to handle someone throwing significantly stiffer forks and higher quality suspension at it. The humble SV650 fits in this catagory - with aggressive modding, it can take advantage of modern suspension and tires and get itself around a track very quickly. The important thing to realize about all of these bikes, though, is that they have fixed the primary issues with The Universal Motorcycle years, mainly poor suspension and an inability to handle the forces created by cornering, and created an arc of suspension and performance that drove motorcycle performance forward across the board in incredible ways. At this point, any bike from those days, properly setup, could probably do 170mph pretty sanely. Many of them would start to come close to that off the factory floor, and by the later days, would surpass that entirely.

The Electronics Wars

At this point, the big 4 manufacturers were locked in a cut and thrust on who could shave the closest to the limit with suspension and power. And then BMW dropped the bombshell that was the S1000RR, and fired the first shot in The Electronic Wars. BMW had realized that the modern problem with bikes wasn't that their suspension wasn't up to par, it was that there was no way to put that kind of power down that we were moving towards with a squishy human brain via a single analog input, and the future was providing electronic assistance to get the rider around a track faster. This also let them build a staggeringly powerful engine while also being able to keep it from acquiring the same reputation as the ZX10R as a widowmaker. With the power of electronics, it was possible to manage an engine that would have historically been unmanageable. By tuning a fly by wire setup to manage power curves, by modulating the throttle bodies independently from what the rider requested, it is possible to turn a monster of a motorcycle into a completely calm, controlled ride. Turn the electronics off, and things are gonna get legit, real fast, but if you leave everything on, you've just turned your superbike into a scooter, and frankly, a large chunk of the population is looking for superbike looks with scooter performance. The start of The Electronics Wars began with the S1000RR, and now just about everyone is on board with it, even Suzuki, the slowest of the Big 4.

Buying Smart and Cheap

So, knowing what you know now, you should realize that there are some easy cost to performance optimizations to make here. Buying any literbike supersport made in the last 8 years without electronics, for example, is a terrible idea, because you're buying endgame tech from the Suspension Wars, which was obsoleted immediately by the S1000RR. Lots of people are out there looking at 5 year old supersports, not realize they may as well just buy a 12 year old supersport for 60% of the price, because the actual performance is going to be pretty much the same. You're not going to know that you could have been doing 135 rather than 125 when you hammer the throttle on a, say, 02 CBR929RR, vs a 2012 GSX-R750. In fact, I'd bet there's no difference at all if you took a nice condition 929 with all of the suspension properly set up and placed it against a 2012 GSX-R750 with the same setup. Except that the 929 rider would be willing to throw down faster lap times because the Gixxer rider has another 5k tied up in their bike.

The best value is in finding the bikes that pushed their way through most of their evolutionary period the earliest. For the UJMs, I find that in the oddball, like the CBX, which sells itself on engine absurdity over performance. For the Suspension Wars epoch, you're looking at bikes like the SV650, the Honda 929, the early R1, the early upright sportbikes if you're into upright sporting stuff (94 Honda F2, for example - early cartridge forks). Any supersport from 2005 to around 2011 (excepting the S1000RR) is going to be functionally identical and preferences will be down to idiosyncrasies of the rider. If you're looking to spend in the range of the previous 5 years, you should be looking for the bikes that jumped on the early traction control bandwagon - the S1000RR, ZX10, R1, the 1198. There's also some oddball choices in there like the MV Agusta F4, but Italians always come with some overhead.

So what's the short list for me of bikes that hit this sweet spot?
For The Suspension Wars days:
The torquier, more upright, 4 cylinder 600s - ZX6E, Honda F2/F3/F4, CB600F, YZF600R
The upright twins: SV650, Tuono.
The Supersports: Early 636 ZX6Rs, early CBR600RRs, Honda 929/954, early R1s (pre-dual undertail), early RSV Milles, early ZX10s.
Upright large displacement bikes: ZRX, Bandit 1200, early FZ1s, CBX1100R, ZX11, ZX12.

Spending more than you spend on these bikes is definitely into the point of diminishing returns on performance per dollar spent. If you're looking to score an early contender to the electronics wars, you're looking at the following bikes (in order of personal preference).
RSV4 (TC equipped models, obviously)
R1 (2012+)
ZX10 (2011+)
S1000RR (09+)
1198 (or 1098 models with TC)

There you go. You'll note that nearly all of your bikes fit into the catagory of max spend during Suspension Wars years, which just tweaks me out from a spending money on bikes standpoint.

These are the bikes I'd be looking at:
http://seattle.craigslist.org/tac/mcy/5328010940.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/skc/mcy/5332057824.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/kit/mcy/5328858513.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/mcy/5310380956.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/mcy/5304850531.html
http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/mcy/5334645024.html

Spending 8k on something that doesn't have some form of electronics is insanity, IMO.

You could also buy a new 2012 R1 for awhile for ~9.5k. Spending 8.5k on one is crazy.

AncientTV posted:

Going to see this guy tomorrow. Hoping for combination nothing-is-actually-wrong-with-the-bike and offering an insultingly low amount since he's moving.