boss has had similar worries about parting it out as what you laid out, and I am trying to sway my boss into seeing if we can get it running again as the previous owner said it was running prior to letting it sit.
I'm glad you weren't offended. Just to kinda' lay out the hows and whys: most of these bikes were in the showrooms when the company started to have trouble and they had a multi-year, underdog buildup to the bikes being produced at all. Very few bikes got bought as "just another motorcycle" and subsequently, they don't have the usual turnover of parts and trying to keep them running and whatever. The bikes were sold and kind of sorted themselves into a few conditions.
- There are super low mile bikes or even crate bikes where the owners are waiting for their bike's to be collectible and protect them as an investment. They won't need parts now, if ever. Most of them are probably rotting in place, having never been ridden and corrosion still taking them.
- There are owners like me who keep them in running condition, baby them and wax them and take them out occasionally. With eight of them, I can only put so many miles a year. Because of that, all of mine have "low miles". People mistakenly think they're new when I ride them somewhere.
- There are some owners who ride them semi-often and put miles on them. These guys know all too well that the hardest thing to repair would be the engine. Clean, low mile bikes crop up for sale a few times a year, with more bikes than buyers. An engine might sell but, $1500? Nobody is spending more on an engine when clean bikes can't find buyers.
The bottom line is: there aren't many potential customers who are trying to fix their old bike that got a dent in the tank. As an example, there are three gas tanks on eBay right now. All of them have been out there for years. The red one is Suncoast. They tried very briefly to sell that bike. All the tins are still there, the engine, the forks, the frame, the cluster, the exhaust. I can't even tell what's missing.
There just aren't enough of these bikes getting 'damaged' to consume the average used parts from a dismantled one. If you part it out, condition will be absolutely, 100% everything. It will be guys wanting to replace pitted chrome so the chrome would have to be perfect and not too expensive. Someone might want that tank or fender but, it had better be showroom perfect. Nobody is buying tanks to "repaint the bike." They want a perfect part or at least better than what they have.
Worse for you: because there were so few bikes made, each of the color combinations is 100-200 bikes. The most common colors are not the one you have (most of them were black with red pinstripes). There were a total of 116 of the blue bikes made. That means you have 115 other bikes in the entire world who will be a candidate for any of those tins. That doesn't mean its rare. The red tank Suncoast has is 1 of 133 and it's sitting there. They'd have to already have their own bike and yours would need to be much much cleaner for them to consider it at all.
Here's another one being parted:https://www.ebay.com/str/autonetmoto
I nearly bought that bike just before it was low-sided and ended up being dismantled. That was over ten years ago. Look at how much stuff they still have (you have to search in their inventory for Henderson--they misspelled Excelsior). Most of the parts they sold, were sold relatively cheap. I know because they ended up on some of my bikes. It was all very nice OEM chrome stuff. They didn't make much on that bike.
So pure profit motivation: sell the bike you have with nothing more invested. Wash it, wax it, sell it non-running, to an enthusiast for $2,000-2,500. Let them invest the sweat equity of sorting out all the little problems. It's going to need a fuel pump rebuild and probably injector cleaning at a minimum. Hope and pray the tank isn't leaking. Battery, two tires and tubes, your labor, etc. You could do all of that and it will be a $4,500 bike on a good day.
