It started a few weeks back. I always keep an eye on the salvage auctions at our local yard and this one caught my eye. I was actually joking with a friend of mine about why they would present this on a pallet when it looked like it could easily be put upright:
Anyway...a few auctions had passed and this thing was STILL THERE. Musing aplenty...next thing you know I'm throwing the opening bid in at a negligible price....no other bids...then it ends up being mine
So, off to the auction yard I go thinking all the time "what surprises am I going to find on the pallet side of the bike?". It didn't really worry me to be honest - as long as the thing could sit upright on the stand it was still worth twice what I was paying for it so it was just costing me a bit of my time.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find virtually no damage to the hidden side of the bike:
Here's a couple of pics of some of the other victims in the yard - I guess you'd become immune to it if you worked there - but I felt pretty depressed being amongst such evidences of tragedy:
Back to the bike - here it is back at home base:
Potentially promising sign on the mileage
The bike was listed as an insurance write-off - and with a notation in the damage description saying "Malicious/ Vandalised"...so there were a few things that went along with that. One being someone had tried to remove the fuel cap by unbolting the ring mount:
Not sure if you would class this as "malicious"
And a few oddball things:
Anyway, moving on...there was no key for the bike. No problem - I know a guy that gave me a box of keys a while ago:
And some potential matches (but no luck):
Yes - I tried a bunch of other keys but no matches for this bike. So...time to pull the locks...
I bought a set of lock picking tools off eBay a while ago. I'd never actually used them because whenever I ever needed to mess with a lock I'd already had them apart - but this was a different story:
I knew from experience that the lock retaining wafer was at the bottom of the barrel and accessible from the key entry....so I just had to choose my weapon:
So....put it in and pretty much just jiggle it around until....
Hell yes!
So onto the tank lock....
A bit of jiggling with a screwdriver and it was free:
So now I had the locks out I could put some power in and turn on the ignition - 51K KM is not too bad for one of these...
Then I re-wafered the locks to suit one of the Hyosung keys I had in the box:
So that's it for now. The battery was pretty much dead so I have that on cycle charge. It's slowly coming back to life but we'll see if it does enough to start the bike. It turns over (slowly) but I haven't got to the point where I've put fuel in it yet. The only other fully charged batteries I have at the moment are in my Vstrom or the Burgman and to be honest I couldn't be bothered pulling either of those out.
It appears it may have been a repossession or some other insurance write-off. It's a 2006 model so it's over 15 years old and not on any registers (WOVR, etc). It also came with a clean PPSR / title so that is good.
Anyway - I probably won't do much on it now until after the Easter weekend as we are going camping....but...stay tuned
