Special entry! I’ve said before that the more flexible a person can be, the better the chance for a good outcome. For me, I didn’t really care if I bought a Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki; only that I wanted the vintage vibe along with the 70’s build quality and value that the Japanese makes had going on.
Witht that in mind, you could search each model year by year in Craigslist – but it gets old pretty fast. So let me give you an example of putting your flexibility to work for you with the Craigslist search tool.
Let’s say that you have your heart set on either an old Kawasaki or Yamaha. And you’re okay with something from say…1972 through 1976. Here’s what you would type into the Craigslist or SearchTempest search to select either make in any of those years.
Kawasaki|Yamaha 1972|1973|1974|1975|1976
That character separating the models and years is sometimes called the “pipe”. Mine is located at the upper case on the “\”. NO SPACES between your search term! Just the pipe!
Craigslist changed the world. Think about how you’d go about looking for a used vehicle even 10 years ago. Classified ads in the paper, penny saver classifieds, dealership ads, and the horror of used car lots. For the classifieds – the normal starting point – there would be tiny descriptions since there was cost per word or character to the seller and NO PICTURES. It was even worse for motorcycles since there were few ads, dealerships typically had very few used cycles, and a lot with used bikes was almost unheard of!
Craigslist has made life pretty easy for buyers and sellers to get together on all sorts of things. And the subject here is vintage motorcycles. If you haven’t checked Craigslist – go to http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites to see all the countries, cities, and towns that have local ads. At last count, they served 700 localities in 70 countries. Hopefully there is at least one town near you that has Craigslist ads for you to scour.
Personally, I was willing to travel – to a point – in my search for this rusty Yamaha XS750. And the downside of Craigslist is that you can only search the sites one city/town at a time. For example, if you live in Northern Virginia like I do, I started off searching my DC Craigslist site first, then maybe Fredericksburg, Winchester – you get the idea. I had to expand the search and going through Craigslist town by town looking for something interesting. That does get a little tiresome, but I didn’t see that Craigslist offered any direct way to search more than one of their sites at a time.
That brings me to a couple of cool options for you to think about or try. The simplest that I’ve found is SearchTempest at http://www.searchtempest.com/ This tool allows you to enter your zip code and a mileage based search radius, and what you’re looking for. It then returns all results for your search sorted on distance from your zip code. Or you can select specific cities and towns to include in your search and results! Here's an example:
There are other tools like this, including a Google Gadget called “craigslist search engine”, “crazedlist” and so on. Bottom line, these tools can put more search power at your fingertips. Should make searching a little easier for you!
Next time - it's time to start talking about the motorcycle I brought home and what we're going to do to get it back on the road!
