Bike written off.

[Sly]

:-({|= It's looking like goodbye to my beloved SV, written off this week after a front brake malfunction. I'm well ****ed off :(, as I'd only just spent £350 on new tyres and chain to see me through the winter. I hope to buy it back as salvage, but will have to see what price the insurance company will offer it at.
http://forums.sv650.org/picture.php?albumid=699&pictureid=4879

Details: I'd been having some problems with front brakes binding a bit in the mornings, but this morning, after touching the brakes because a car looked like pulling out in front of me, they suddenly started to drag more and more, until, when I hit some wet leaves frozen onto the surface of the road, the front wheel locked up and dumped me off. Damage is mainly cosmetic apart from broken rear brake lever broken indicator and bent clip-on and broken bar end, but the insurance repair estimate is £4200, while book value is only around £1000.

[speedplay]

Repair costs look a little high to me.

[kwak zzr]

sorry to hear about your bike :( when i read your thread title i thought it could be something i could answer to lol :)

[maviczap]

Not good, but at least you're ok?

[kwak zzr]

Repair costs look a little high to me.

70% of that is labour + VAT

[speedplay]

70% of that is THEFT + STEALTH TAX


corrected for you ;)

[andrewsmith]

sorry to here that
£4200 is steep,

buy it back and break it if you get the option

[Dave20046]

Why are you claiming? That's like £50s worth of damage and you could fit them yourself. It's not even worth the excess, raised premiums or messing about let alone losing the bike!

Glad your in one piece anyhoo :thumright:

[hardhat_harry]

With a price like that I suspect the frame is scratched.

[Bluefish]

must need a new sv decal as well, 4200 seems a little expensive, lmfao.

[cja]

Most of it will be labour!!

I've just got mine back as a cat d, they quoted parts at £1400 and the total cost for repair at £3400!! (Bike valued at £3k, bought back at £1350)

It'll probably be worth buying it back if you can live with a few marks. So far I've spent,

£28 - pattern part brake pedal
£4 - Superglue
£5 - Araldite
£10 - plastic polish for a headlight scuff

So £47 spent so far and I only need a top fairing to get it back on the road. Even getting the fairing new from Suzuki would mean that I get the bike back on the road for less than £330 - less than a 10th of their cost!

They'll get that figure by writing off any parts that are marked. My exhaust only has a small mark at the end and a new one was included in the repair summary.

[Sly]

I haven't seen the quote yet, only had it summarised over the phone, but its about £700 labour and the rest parts, including tank, fairing, front forks, exhaust, levers etc. and £150 for a laser alignment check to see if the frame is bent.

Why are you claiming? That's like £50s worth of damage and you could fit them yourself. It's not even worth the excess, raised premiums or messing about let alone losing the bike!

Glad your in one piece anyhoo :thumright:

Good point, but it's a bit more than £50. I need new calipers or overhaul of current ones, a new RHS clip-on, brake levers, mirror, indicator. I can live with dented tank and scratched silencer and fork stanchions. I am hoping to buy it back at a reasonable price and get it on the road again, but think I'll have to buy another bike in the meantime as I don't have enough time to work on it in the short term and need daily transport for work. I damaged one hand a bit in the accident which will slow me down on the spannering.

[rictus01]

so how long had you been riding it knowing you needed a brake service ? I glad you're OK, but think it was a bit of an expensive way of finding out how bad your brakes were :smt102

[-Ralph-]

Best excuse I've ever heard for locking the front in a panic mate! ;-)




I'm yanking your chain, glad your OK

[Dave20046]

I haven't seen the quote yet, only had it summarised over the phone, but its about £700 labour and the rest parts, including tank, fairing, front forks, exhaust, levers etc. and £150 for a laser alignment check to see if the frame is bent.



Good point, but it's a bit more than £50. I need new calipers or overhaul of current ones, a new RHS clip-on, brake levers, mirror, indicator. I can live with dented tank and scratched silencer and fork stanchions. I am hoping to buy it back at a reasonable price and get it on the road again, but think I'll have to buy another bike in the meantime as I don't have enough time to work on it in the short term and need daily transport for work. I damaged one hand a bit in the accident which will slow me down on the spannering.

well funnily enough I have a set of serviced pointy calipers for sale.easy to fit,or if your not confident less than an hours labour (circa £20 .) I just sold a pair of clipons for about £25, easy to fit your self.i paid £7 for a new front lever from wemoto or £15 from shop, would have thought a standard indicator second hand would be about £10, again easy to fit yourself. mirrors aren't much either or you could kill two birds with one stone and get some brand new indicator mirrors for about £30.

it depends on your age and circumstances I guess as to whether its worth claiming but personally my excess would be more than that and same again every year in premiums. even getting the tank pulled out and sprayed myself would be better than claiming.

[Sly]

so how long had you been riding it knowing you needed a brake service ? I glad you're OK, but think it was a bit of an expensive way of finding out how bad your brakes were :smt102
They'd been intermittently bad for a month i.e. bad for the first mile on a Monday if I hadn't ridden at the weekend. Normally no real problem once they'd been used a few times. This day, they didn't bind up when first used, but did the 2nd time, 50 metres or so before where I dropped it.

Irony is, the bike had actually been booked in for new front brake pads (among other items) at the dealers the previous week, but they said that because they needed an overhaul they didn't have enough time to do the brakes, and told me to book again, at £300 for the bits+labour. I was trying to locate a set of alternative calipers when this happened. I know it's my fault for riding the bike, but it was one of those progressive things that I thought wasn't deteriorating so fast that I didn't have another week to sort something out.

well funnily enough I have a set of serviced pointy calipers for sale.
I'll PM you about these. I've been after some locally but hadn't got around to asking on here.

it depends on your age and circumstances I guess as to whether its worth claiming but personally my excess would be more than that and same again every year in premiums. even getting the tank pulled out and sprayed myself would be better than claiming. You're right, I wasn't sure whether to claim or not and beginning to wish I hadn't, as I could have had the bike running again by now if I'd not had it recovered to the dealers. I was thinking of using a scaffold pole to bend the clip on back into approximate shape and drilling the broken rear brake lever and putting a bolt in as a temporary measure. It was mainly because I couldn't recover the bike myself on the day that I started claim proceedings, and I've not been keen to undertake a lot of my own mechanical work recently as I no longer have a lot of time or a decent workshop.

[Sly]

Best excuse I've ever heard for locking the front in a panic mate! ;-)
I'm yanking your chain, glad your OK

That wasn't the case :) - I'd released the brake lever 50 yards before the wheel locked up, but failing to realise that the brakes were dragging enough to stop the front wheel turning when encountering a covering of frozen dead leaves on a straight road is almost as embarassing :( After riding for 28 years, I should have had the brains to stop, rather than trust the brakes to ease off within the next 1/4 mile as they normally would.