What is an XLCH engine worth

[Kevin56]

G'day again, I'm looking at a 1965 XLCH engine on Ebay. I will give a detailed story so the 101 questions you may have are answered as you read this.

The seller has had a '65 XLCH listed several times since mid December for $2,100 but willing to accept best offers. He has an excellent rating on Ebay.

We had a few discussions via email and he assisted me to find an International transport company with affordable prices. I put in a best offer on Ebay for $1900. The offer was not accepted, counter-offered,nor declined. No response at all. I don't know if he was insulted as he went silent for a few days until the listing lapsed and then relisted it. I sent an apology if I had offended him, wished him well, no hard feelings. He later replied he had been distracted with personal issues and not seen the offer. I'm not naive. I suspect he was trying for a higher offer from me or other potential buyers. It is still listed and I haven't offered again so far.

The thing is, it is complete in the sense that no actual engine parts are missing except the sprocket cover which he had offered to re-fit if I did buy the engine. It is for sale minus the other add-on items: carby, manifold, magneto and generator, but he does have a video of when it was complete in a bike and running. I have watched the video several times. The engine numbers on the video and the photos on Ebay are the same. It ran very sweetly in the video. He says he stripped the bike because there were too many wrong year model parts in good condition that would gain a greater return from restorers than selling the bike complete. He has the generator for sale separately, he recently sold the magneto.

$2,100 seems fair as I am far away in Australia and finding a mid '60's XLCH engine here is like finding an untouched 1903 Harley in a barn..... However I have a contact in USA with a garage full of dismantled Sportsters and he is willing to consider selling me a complete engine with magneto in a month or two. No price discussed. He also offered me a matching year frame for $600 (a reasonable price) and matching swing-arm for $100 (a high price). He's usually good on prices, except for the swing-arm.

So My question is: What is an Average engine in an Average condition worth at swap meets and garage sales? You know the one I mean, the one that may be too good to be true but you have to take a chance or walk away and never know when another may come up for sale next week or next year.

[thefrenchowl]

When the seller put a best offer choice, he has to put in his min price.

Ebay automatically accepts or rejects your offer when compared to his entry.

Hence he doesn't necesseraly sees your offer if it is rejected...

Patrick

[EKHKHK56]

Good point Patrick. Plus many folks might post sale items but not monitor 24 7 because they have other things going on. Kevin If it ran well and you got to see it running that's helpful in figuring condition. Assuming it made no funny noises later...it's a roll of the dice with used engines. If his rep is good 100% that means a lot. Assuming the motor is serviceable I would also want to know if numbers match. Has the transmission blown and case repair done is another question. I've seen a lot of cases sliced and diced and thrown back out there. Those are to be avoided just because. If all the repair work is top notch that's better than mixing in a different case half however. PRICE ..mmm it's so varied it's hard to pin down. I have seen good running complete Sportsters for 1500. There seems to be a lot of deals going on. This was not on Ebay, prices are bound to be higher on Ebay, usually. Because of fees, protection, and widespread buying audience. That was a bit of an exception but times are still tough and deals can be found. I would say early XL engines complete either running or perfect core are worth 1-3K maybe somewhere up to 5 if professionally machined & assembled and with everything Mag, Gen, Carb, etc. AND receipts for parts, rebuild/warranty information. Machine work is not cheap and if it is, it's not good. So every situation is different, you have dig in and find what suits your needs, and weigh price against engine condition. Usually it is much much more expensive to re-build an engine than it is to buy a decent runner. However than you know what you have. On Ks my machine shop guy is at $600 per cyl for rebuild plus parts. (Good thing I get my racer discount) So prices are all over the board these days due to dismantlers, economy and varieties of deals. Erik K

[ambike]

Kev,

I understand your plight but I would AVOID that motor. ( BTW, seeing Pat's reply...Yes, that's the way it works )

That POS mill has hard a hard life.

Chrome-plated aluminum is a nasty bitch. I've seen too many cam covers with plated bushings. It's junk.

The rocker covers...ditto. Chrome is shot. Often times, shoulders at bolt holes become less before plating, & always after old chrome is removed for restoration.

Plated gasket surfaces ? No thanks.

You want to start with something having its OEM hardware. Acorn nut kits ?..... well, to each his own, but again, no thanks. Look on the primary cover. See the Allen screw. $ 5 says that's stripped and more trouble to be found.

The welded case cuts the price to ho-hum. Missing parts is nothing but more future aggravation & expense. Famous last words : Oh, that's nothing ! You can find that easily on eBay. Oh yeah, NOTHING is right when the parts are not there. What a joke...just like the MF'ers claiming they have a heated & cooled, climate controlled garage. But there's a pile of cat shit in a junk-filled corner. Jaysus, the po' cat doesn't have a better place to crap than India's untouchables. Speaking of -touchs, that drain plug is a nice touch with its color-coding. WTF is that orange crap ?

Speaking of stripped or worn, the sprocket cover threads look as suspect as the upper dowel.

My Proven logic / MO : The SAME time wasted trying to repair worn-out junk is better spent shopping & being patient. Or, working for productive wages & saving my pesos to buy a quality item. Patience is a virtue.

Shipping costs will be the same for scrap iron or something functional. Beauty or the Beast ? No-Brainer !

The top end on that motor is worn out. Look into the intake. Of course that's a given, but here's the rub...what over-bore do we have ? Each successive boring is increasingly off center line.

Wait...I have another $ 5 in my pocket : That $ 5 says the front con-rod is sloppier than...than...than what was hauled on that old chopper back in the day. lmao

Unless seen & inspected, ALL XL trans gears are potential sources of trouble.

Last but not least : Where's the GD speedo drive ? I could be wrong, but I don't see it. Did he sell that too and forget to mention the trans gear went with it ?

Bottom Line = That thing is bait. Lousy, Stinking Bait. No offense to the seller. USA is a Bolshevik-infected powder keg, but our Constitutional Rights do provide cover to over-charge & under-deliver. Likewise, I whole-heartedly support our rights to say, No.

Personally speaking as I am, the only things I see worthwhile are :

No broken fins jumped out at me, although there's usually one hiding / MIA.

What's shown of the VIN looks OK.

[Kevin56]

Oh Sweet Lord of all things Sportster...Thank you guys, all of you. Firstly with Ebay if an offer is below the seller's minimum it is automatically rejected but; if it is above his minimum and below his maximum it goes for his consideration. He ignored it, in fact ten minutes before I lodged my offer we had discussed the engine at length on email and I said I was about to lodge a formal offer and start at $1900. To be honest I was nervous and expected him to tell me to do obscene things to myself.....But he went silent.

I get the feeling that he invites offers but wont budge much, and throwing in a sprocket cover is like a $50 discount giving back something off the bike he was going to sell separately. Chrome problems: I bought some '60's chrome rocker boxes recently to fit on my '74 Sporty, I hope they do without problems....., usually they are expensive, but I got a good deal including the innards, rockers, shafts, springs etc etc, $100. The seller said "Oh the chrome comes off easy with steel wool" Hahahahahahahahahahaha NO IT DOESN'T, but they were cheap so I smiled, paid and left giggling like a schoolgirl. There's a shop here that removes chrome and impurity in Stainless steel using electrolysis, it's like reversing the chroming process. That seller is now my regular contact for parts, cheap and affordable.

The two case numbers do match, but he said it looked like the left case near the primary cover "may" have been repaired, he couldn't say because of the flaking paint. Flaking paint? I thought to myself "Scrape it off and have a LOOK!"

Ambike, are we brothers from a different mother? Your reply was so detailed and sarcastic, honest, refreshing and damning I was laughing with tears welling in my eyes. I did see some of those issues and accepted them as "par for the course" but if anyone talked me out of this, you did.

You guys have knocked some sense into me, I think I'm better off nurturing my U.S contact with the garage full of dead Sportsters....he offered to put together an engine, same year frame and swing-arm, but no price worked out yet. Although I already have a frame, but there is always Ebay where buyers like me think that gold-tinted wrapping paper is 24 carat

[sportsterpaul]

Agree with ambike, only niggle is that rebores do not go off center, if the shop knows what it is doing. Agree 100% chromed aluminum is junk. Great you have a local contact that can strip, but ask him if he can strip with the bronze cam bushings still in the cover. If its a copper-nickel-chrome triple plate its hard to see them stripping off that last layer of copper without screwing up the bushings. So now you have to pull the bushings first, and replace then, and then you are supposed to line-hone them so the cams run true. Simple message, any chromed aluminum is worthless.

A mechanic once told me a complete Sportster engine/tranny rebuild was about $2100, and that was 15 years ago. So a used motor could be worth 2100 dollars or it could be worth nearly zero.

Sad fact is mid-60s engines in decent shape are getting mighty hard to find. Only eBay play I would recommend for a guy in Australia is to see a video of the bike running and the guy holding up this week's newspaper. Then he pulls the engine and sells it to you.

It sounds like you know the other avenue-- find someone you trust out here to vet the engine, or rebuild it for you here and then send it down under. Are there a lot of Sportsters in New Zealand? It might be worth a trip. The one person I would trust to build a motor 12,000 miles away is Dr. Dick. Send him a PM. There are shops and dealers, but I don't know of a single shop that has not pissed off at least one customer. Its not always the shop's fault. This old iron is persnickety and it often breaks once a new owner gets his hands on it and rides it differently.

ambike's advice rings so true. I decided to sell my hoard of parts this year. So I am packing to go to the AMCA swap meet outside of Daytona Beach Friday. I decide to take all three spare engines I have, that I "loose assembled" out of parts laying around. What an idiot. I now see the 1973 engine has unmatched belly numbers. That explains why most of the cylinder studs are missing, the machinist I bought it from was getting ready to flatten out the decks. You should also hone the flywheel bearings, the trap-door and a bunch of other stuff. I had put a dry clutch mainshaft in a wet clutch bike, I had a clutch basket without a starter gear in an electric start setup-- the list of atrocities goes on and on. And that was for engines I was going to keep for myself.

Not being a scumbag, thanks mom, and not being and idiot, thanks to this forum and XLForum, I took the engines apart and will sell the parts separate and be honest about the non-matching belly numbers. Yeah I have a chrome 69 gearcase and a chrome primary cover-- that is the kind of stuff that ends up in a junkpile that ends up in the garage if guys like me. I could have kept the engines together and took a picture and peddled them on eBay. There is junk like that out there. Just last month I stripped a nice 1956 black oil bag to see the scumbag had painted a rusty chrome oil tank black, and peddled it to poor unsuspecting me. On eBay.

Oh one more misery. They might confiscate the engine at Customs if it is on their hot sheet. Ask Kirk at Sportster Specialties about that. He built a bike he had all checked out with the California DMV. When it got to customs they flagged it as stolen. Turns out Customs has a more comprehensive hot sheet I guess. Thankfully Kirk had all the receipts for the new stuff, so Customs let him come and unbolt all the new stuff. Guy in Japan never got the bike.

So you are buying swing arms and chaingaurds and engines. I take it you don't have a working bike out there?

[ambike]

"... only niggle is that rebores do not go off center..."

Do you bore cyls. ?

If a cylinder base flange is no longer dead flat, the bore's original C/L will ____________ ?

[mikeslemmon]

that motor isn't worth much

[sportsterpaul]

Do you bore cyls. ?

No, I have never bored a cylinder with my own hands. But I have watched a good mechanic bore dozens. And I read the Brush Hone documents about how the hone does not true up a cylinder, that is the boring bar's job.

Cast iron is remarkably stable, that is why they use it in machinery. I have never ever heard of the base flange distorting, although I guess some brute could torque the base nuts so tight they warp the flange. We know the head gasket flange can get out-of-flat from over torque. If an animal like that owned the bike, there is a lot more wrong everywhere besides warped flanges.

What is more likely causing off-center bores is the spindle bearings in the boring bar are shot. Each re-bore is supposed to be 0.010 bigger. So a good tight boring bar sure can't go much off-center if it supposed to stay in the metal the whole length of the bore. The mechanics I trust have taught me how critical boring bar spindle bearings are. They tell me that you can extend the bar the whole way and tug on the end and swear it is as tight as a squirrel's ear, but it is still shot. The smart mechanics either used a newer bar, or had the spindles reconditioned by a pro machine builder. There are plenty of antique boring bars out there, especially for Iron Sportsters. Some mechanics brag about how old their boring bar is. Then they have to go 20 over to stay in the meat, and wonder why.