I’d never heard of Tenterfield NSW until the Gumtree ad popped up in June. I had to Google it. But hey, Australia is a big place, with a lot of towns outside of the capital cities. Tenterfield is one of them, nestled inland, and south of the NSW/Queensland border.
The bike was close enough. Not perfect – it was a ’90 rather than an ’89, but it was complete (including the side fairings), it was running (allegedly), and it was at least a little closer than Perth. The asking price was $2200, and it had been in some guy’s collection of FZRs, and had allegedly spent the last five years sitting in his living room. It also had a rear seat cowl, which was quite rare for this bike – I’d never seen one until this point. That was the good news.
The bad news is that I know absolutely nobody within 300km of Tenterfield, at least nobody that I would call up and say ‘hey would you mind popping out for a few hours to check out a bike for me?’ In the year 2018 I was hopeful that we could possible use some form of technology like a smartphone and a Google Hangouts or similar session to do a live walk around of the bike while it was running, but the seller didn’t really ‘do’ technology, and in fact didn’t own a smart phone, so this was always going to be a significant risk. It was also unregistered, and hadn’t been on the road (legally) for around five years. According to the seller though it was a ‘great bike’, something he kept on reiterating, which also rang alarm bells loud and long.
I managed to get some more pictures which showed that the handlebars had been swapped out for some more ‘colourful’ ones, which probably meant crash damage.
Looking closely at the pictures I could see multiple dings and scrapes on the plastics, but it is always hard to tell from the photos, and as I said, at least it was complete…
After weighing it up, including wondering whether there were many or any others still left on the road, I haggled down to $1900 (which was fair to offset the costs of transport, which ended up being around $700), and the freight company set a date in early July to ship it to Adelaide.
The search, at least the initial one, was over. Now all there was to do was to wait.
Next: Arrival day.