Blast In the Past

In case you haven't seen, I saw this the other day about the 2010 Buell Blast:



www.buell.com/en_us/bikes/blast/

Looks like Erik Buell decided to have fun ending it's poor poor life...

a fella i work with now use to be an engineer at Buell in the late 90's he has stories of the cleaning crew disposing of old test bikes. they would take end-loaders and scoup up 2-3 x-1's or cyclones and drop them in the dumpster, complete running bikes, but unable to be sold, so they threw them away.

most of the manufactur's do that mostly the show bikes and preproduction stuff as they can be used as a right off and also they don't have any extra taxes to be paid on them it is a sin but that's bean counters for you. when we are done with all our donated suzuki's we are required to crush or destroy them last year before i started here they had to destroy one of the original gs1100 katana's we tried to get suzuki to save it and put it in a museum but they would have none of it and actually threatened the school with legal procedings if it wasn't destroyed and also they wanted video proof that it had been. it was a sin that bike had been here since 1982 or 83 and had less than 100 miles on it. not cool to see one of suzukis most influencle bikes to be treated like that but had to be done for our sake.

There must be another way, however in China they do this to female babies.
So the odd Buell or or two or even a Katana in the dumpster is no great shakes.
I think that Kawasaki know better!!

in 1985 yamaha canada took all there demo models out to a moto x track and invited a bunch of writers and sponsered racers out for a demo day and i mean demolition day i had a picture of rollerball pederson jumping a brand new v-max pre production model about 15 ft in the air he also jumped a virago and a venture royal. so it just isn't suzuki either i'm sure kawi does or has done it in the past. alot of these show bikes end up here as our bike season is later than in the states so they seem to get crunched here more than anywhere else it saves shipping them back over seas again also harley in canada has a couple of trucks that drive around canada inm the summer doing test ride day's at all the dealerships and if those bikes don't end up here for training purposes they get destroyed and parted out for training aid's.

Man I would drive day and night just to pick up one of those bikes. Glad I haven't seen a Kawi in a dumpster.

It's amazing how delicate and fragile vehicles really are. It doesn't take much to dent them or break stuff, and boy is it expensive. Seeings how riding a motorcycle is inherentely risky and that probably 75% of all new sport bikes are dropped within the first three months, it really is a sad, sad thing that even more bikes are just scrapped on a whim. Oh well, it's in the money I guess.

That pic of crumpled metal looks like an old 900 I had after I T-Boned a dumptruck back in the 80's. All I could salvage was the rear wheel and the wiring harness........ And that they do this on purpose is sickening... Damn Bean counters