In '99 I was selling off my collection to finance a long O.S. trip. I had a very tidy low mileage '75 Honda CR250. Still had the warning stickers on the tank. (Kick,kick,kick)
I took it to a swap meet and put $700 on it. Had a guy from a VMX club tell me it was overpriced and I would never get my money for it because it wasn't pre '75 elligible. I told him for $700 he had a lot of parts to keep a '74 CR running.
I ended up selling it to some guy who just wanted a cheap bike to chase his kid around a paddock with. Because it was cheap, it's probably leaning against the back shed in the weather now.
So the question is, should I have hoarded it until it was worth something and sold it to a VMX enthusiast were today it might grace a race track, or was I better to not hoard and let it go to disapear into the motorcycling black hole.
Let's not look at it as hoarding, let's see it as caretaking and saving classic motorcycles until such a time that a better use/owner is found for them. The only reason VMX exists is because someone decided to hoard old bikes rather than sell them to the wreckers or let kids destroy them in the paddock.
I was at a swapmeet once and was bored so decided to start haggling over a '75 WR250 husky in mint condition. No paint worn off the tank mint. I had no use for this bike. The bloke selling it needed it gone and some neighbour kids had offered him $800 for it to thrash in the paddock. He let me have it for $700 because he knew I would save it. I rode it twice, didn't like it, and 'hoarded' it in the corner for years. One day a bloke came along who wanted to race it and made me a fair offer and I let him have it. It now get's raced.