Like Cafe bikes and such. I have done a bolt on build for a friend with a Bonneville and am curious if there is enough of a market to make custom rides and earn a little money on the side. It seems that much of the time these bikes sell for similar money as their unmodded versions so I am just curious if there is enough margin to (mostly) make a decent profit.
If shopped very carefully and you own the tools to mount and balance tires I think you could make some decent side money. Every cheap motorcycle needs tires. Every. Single. One. Which eats up profit margins a bit. Make sure the bike doesn't use some weird size that's tough to get tires for. Don't try to profit off of a Yamaha Radian. They're like the Volvos of motorcycles. Awesome, but no one wants to pay decent coin for a nice one.
My BIL suggested doing custom work on other people's bikes similar to the work we did on the Bonne. Might be some good stuff there.
If you can dock the tail and do hard-tail conversions at home you can make some cash. For the one bike that I have done in the past hardtail it was ~400$ for the guy to strip the rear out and do the welding of the frame extension that I supplied. Worth every penny in my book and he had a line of people waiting for his services.
I built a Café CB360 and kept pretty good receipts - down to every can of spray paint and hardware. I had just over $3k in it and sold it on craigslist for $5400.
that worked out to $3.22 per hour I had into it.
Currently building a 1975 Moto Guzzi café and a 1980 Yamaha XS400 Brat for the wife.
I think that trend rode out the door about a decade ago, not long after all the biker build shows on TV were cancelled. There used to be a ton of little custom bike shops around here, they're all gone now.
Build one in your head, then imagine who would buy it.
I rather agree with the above comment about the custom/chopper/etc thing having passed.
I'd also say that very few have the artistic skills to make truly desirable machines. If you don't have it, people won't buy what you create.
Based on what I've seen locally, it would be very difficult to make much money doing this. I doubt the pool of clients who want to pay someone to do bolt ons is very deep... There IS a market for custom fabrication and detail work though. You need to have some artistic and engineering skills and I think the market is likely still small.
As other have said, custom bikes seems to be be a feast or famine industry. A few years ago, there were a lot of shops around doing lots of custom stuff (mostly chopper and bobbers) but they have all mostly folded or radically downsized. I think doing Cafe work is even less viable because while it is presently somewhat popular, it is still not nearly as large a market as the shop built chopper stuff. Secondly, a big aspect of what I see in cafe racers is doing as much of the work yourself as possible.
I think that you can make money. the key is buying well. Like I said above, I just bought a XS400 for $450 with title. it needs a seat and a coil and a few other small items. I could get it on the road, clean it up, make some minor mods with cheap bolt-ons for under $1,000 and probably sell it for $1,500 based on what I see others asking for similar bikes.
But the plan is to do a lot more. Pull it apart, clean and paint everything, make it look a lot better (not worrying about performance improvements).
I could easily have $2500 into it and 5 times the hours. At the end of the day I may get my money back but I doubt I would recoup the labor I put into it.
If it were me, I would keep an eye out for good deals on bikes and then beat the seller up on price. get them running, clean them up, and then take a lot of really good pictures and make really good craigslist ads.
Might not be as glamorous as some of the hipster builder shops that are really just there to sell $38 t-shirts, but I think that I would have fun doing it.
The question really becomes "who are you going to sell it to?" A cheap running UJM will always have a place in the world so long as gasoline is available but you're probably best off getting it running and rolling and leaving the bikes stock unless easy modding opportunities present themselves. Example, the stock seat is torn and the pipes are rusted out so it gets a tracker or cafe seat and a set of slip one. Just about any running road legal motorcycle with a title is worth $1000-1500, so keep that in mind as you buy and sell and upgrade as that might be all you can get for bikes no one remembers. Nostalgia usually doesn't bring their wallet with them.
Of course if it's only a fun side gig, as long as you break slightly better than even its probably worth the time. Old bikes are cool and fun to work on usually.
Yeah, I am sure you guys are right. The more I thought on it, the more I realized that there isn't a market for anything custom around here. It might be fun but definitely not a money maker.
While the custom/cafe train has long left, a nicely restored UJM always seems to pull good money. The key would be buying right, having good sources for clean parts, and being able to do the mechanical and electrical work. That means a lot more than just wires.
Yeah, buy buy non runners and get them running. Or, part them out. Just like cars, they are worth a lot more in parts than whole.
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