Sportster sale time
 

Hi, the time has come to sell the sportster and move onto the next project. Trouble is, I don’t really know what it’s worth. I currently have an agreed value of £18K with my insurance company. I reckon I’ve spent something like 20K building it but doubt I could ask more than £15K? One option I’m thinking of is selling it without engine, gearbox and management (as I’ve only just built the drive train and have a reuse plan). So basically I’d be selling a fully registered car with 800 miles on it and the new owner just needs to choose an engine and colour to paint it. I reckon that must be worth close to 13K when you look at the cost of a kit plus all the extra bit’s I’ve done. Whether this would be appealing to prospective buyers, I’m not sure.

Any thoughts?

I sold mine recently. It was a very well finished and sorted car. It only fetched 9k. I am afraid that for an unpainted and uncomplete car you must expect much less than that. The amount you spent on it is immaterial unfortunately. It's the market demand - which doesn't seem to be strong at the moment...

Cheers, Robin

Yeah, I know where you're coming from. I'm just looking at the options at the moment. I don't want to give it away but accept you never get a good return. Looking at a Marlin price list from 2011, it was 6K for the 3 modules (ex vat) and I did a quick calculation that if I removed the engine, box and ecu leaving everything else, I'd have spent around another 6 grand on parts, all new apart from the seats. Not sure where the rest of the money went. So assuming 50% loss simply due to the now second hand (though good as new) nature of it, 6-7k for a full rolling chassis less engine choice and paint choice would be a steal. Less than that and I'll build a new shed in the garden to store it in until it takes my fancy again.

On the paint issue, I feel like if I had it painted just to sell, I'd be just throwing money away as you'll still not increase the value. Plus I'd be limiting my market further as only some people would like the colour. I suppose the other option is to find a buyer who knows what colour they want but want me to do the graft disassembling and reassembling it.

Trouble with me is I enjoy the planning/research, designing and building much more than the running especially given the sportster's lack of utility other than as a sunny day toy. I built the new engine over the winter, re-wired it, new engine management plus loads of modifications on the pre-IVA set up and it (disappointingly) all came together really well with only minor issues to sort out. So now I'm bored and I'm looking for things to change on it for the sake of it, like another engine swap!

The planned Circuit of Wales was going to be 4 miles from my house so the promise of local track days was holding my interest but that has just been dealt a funding blow so is cancelled for the mo.

What I really need is to find someone local to buy and own/race it then just use me as their mechanic to keep me happy.