Back in January I decided to buy a Motorbike, and I had figured that a cruiser was what I wanted. I started to look around the bike shops in Northern Thailand and discovered that

1. There are a hell of a lot of bikes for sale in Thailand.
2. Most of them are crap!

I looked at lots of bikes and then decided the choice was down to a Honda Shadow, Kawasaki Vulcan or a Yamaha Dragstar. If money was no object then I would have bought a Harley, of course.

I found my Kawasaki Vulcan Classic in a small bike shop near the airport at Chiang Mai, the shop owner seemed to know what he was selling and his prices were fair. He had a batch of Kawasaki Vulcan VN400A imported bikes that had just come off the boat from Japan, so I picked a bike and then got him to swap a few bits from the others in the batch so that I had just about all the best bits on mine.

When I collected the bike it had a fresh paint job, and all the alloy bits had been polished to look like new, but there were a couple of problems. The front brake was useless and the headlight was not working, so I decided to fix that myself. I traced the headlight problem to a faulty switch and ordered one on ebay which took about a week to arrive. I bought a uprated twin pot caliper with a new set of brake pads, and I changed the brake fluid so that the front brake is like new. The tank badges were not with the bike, I found a new set on ebay for about US$20, and a handful of other bits to finish it off.

The bottom line is that this bike, which is a 1996 model now looks new, drives like new and cost me about 90,000 Thai Baht (under $3000) with all the bits that I bought. Or, about the same price as a new Honda Phantom 200 which is the biggest new bike you can buy in Thailand.

Now I am enjoying my Kawasaki Vulcan, I have not been on any long rides yet but I will do as soon as the rainy season is over. Call me a wimp, but I don’t like getting caught out in the monsoon rains.

My most valuable accessory is the Clymer Workshop Manual that I bought from the states, it turns out that this model is also manufactured by Kawasaki in the USA so parts are plentiful and cheap on ebay.com

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 7:20 am and is filed under Bikes, Crazy Rants, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.