I've bought a lot of old Harley parts on eBay and they didn't all turn out to be great deals.  I've learned from experience is that condition is paramount.  It takes a lot more time and money to refurbish a rusty or damaged piece than it costs to buy a good one in the first place.  Another issue is chrome.  Since I restore old bikes, I want parts with an original finish.  When I first started out, I was told it was easy to remove chrome.  This turns out not to be true, especially when dealing with older chrome on aluminum castings, and I ended up with a lot of chrome parts I can't use (for sale soon on eBay!).  Now, whenever I'm looking for something, I pay a little more and find the best available.  Once I've found the right part, I'm  faced with the question we all face--How much should I bid?  One way to figure this out  is by using ebay's "Completed Item" feature.

When I talk to other Harley guys in person and on the forums, I'm surprised to find how many of them don't know this feature exists.  The completed item feature allows you to search back over the last couple weeks and see how much other ebayers have paid for the same part.  For instance, if I'm in eBay motors and want to see how much recent buyers have paid for a certain model of vintage oil tank, I can enter "Oil Tank" in the search field and then check "completed items" in the parameters on the left.  When I click on search, I get a list of all the tanks sold over couple weeks and the prices they went for.

I'm sure a lot of you already use this feature, and I may be restating the obvious.  But there are a few tweaks that can make the feature even more useful.  One problem you'll encounter is that we don't all call the same part by the same name, and even when we do, we don't always spell it right.  For instance, a lot of folks on ebay misspell "Sportster;"  I know it's easy to do, because I've done it a time or two myself.  The common mispelling is "Sporster" (missing one first "t").  So, whenever I search, I add the misspelling to my search parameters and often come up with items I might have otherwise missed (This works with active auctions, too, and remember, if a lot of people missed them, there will probably be less competition from other bidders).  If you're doing a completed item search, try every name and spelling you can think of for a given part.  If nothing comes up, widen your search parameters and keep trying.  What you call a tool box, someone else may call a coil cover; what I call a headlight nacelle, you might call a shroud or a tin.

Now you know the recent prices, you have an idea of what a part goes for and can adjust for condition.  Unless I need something desperately, I try to figure out the going price for a part in the same condition and then set a limit for how much I'll pay.  Early on I got carried away in an auction for a wheel hub I really needed and ended up paying eighty dollars for it.  Later that week an almost identical hub with no reserve and a ten dollar starting bid went unsold.  If  I'd been a little more patient, I could have saved myself seventy bucks.

Please register whether or not you found this guide useful. 

Fabulous Blacky