The inception of the internet has been a life-changeing occasion for me. In 1996 I restored a CB350F that I'd bought at a swap meet, and parts were just "unobtainium". My local shop (Run by Rex Wolfendon, Aussie CB750 race legend) were uncharacteristically sympathetic, and would source a lot of parts from Japan for me, if I was prepared to wait for them to fill a bulk monthly order from the parent company.
I worked part time at a gas station on saturdays to pay for my
obsession er, hobby, I did a 15 hour shift, and received around 200 bucks "cash in hand" for my efforts, so I'd march into the Honda shop on Monday morning 200 bucks richer, and walk out with a tiny bag of parts. (try 90 bucks for a points cover, and 90 bucks per side for genuine sidecover badges, and this was in 1996!) One of the guys there was really helpfull, and he even sold me his own set of NOS 4 into 4 pipes for 500 bucks, which was brilliant, when the list price was over 2000!
All up, that bike cost me around 4000 bucks to completely restore. I loved it, but it was too small for me, and I was sick of getting beaten off the lights by 4 cylinder "econo-cars". At that time though, I knew I'd never get my money back, so when a mate who owns a tool store offered me a shiny new geared head thread cutting lathe with a 3 foot bed and 17 inch swing, and chucked in $1000 worth of extra tooling, I was more than happy to see it go.
In 1999, a bloke in Sweet Home, Oregon, who I was yakking to on the "new to me" internet thingy introduced me to something new called "EBay". I couldn't believe it, even when the Aussie dollar was only worth 59 US cents, (now it's worth almost 99, how things have changed!) it seemed to me that the world had gone mad, I could buy parts for my bikes (lots and lots of parts..........) for a small fraction of what I was paying at the local bike shop.
The local bike shop closed down shortly afterwards, probably because I (and everyone else who'd discovered EBay) stopped buying their parts and started buying online. Now of course I also buy from other online stores, (CycleX, David Silver, Z1 Enterprises etc) but EBay is always my first port of call, I picked up a NOS Guiliari seat for my cafe project for only $172.50 last week, less than half what a repro would have cost me! Most bike shops here only really sell new and used bikes and carry very few spares and only for late model bikes, because they know they can't match the online stores. I have a certain sympathy for them, but that won't dissuade me from buying my parts online. Cheers, Terry.
