[Davemurphy007]

In quite the dilemma with my curvy SV650, which I would appreciate some opinions on.

My SV650 was my first bike and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed owning it over the last few years, but my circumstances have changed and the time has come to move it on - which would be pretty straightforward except it’s currently not running.

I’ve had a tough time with the bike over the last year or so with rough running through sporadic use. When I was using it every day it would start on the button and run beautifully, leave the bike a week or two and it would run on a single cylinder to begin with and then clear its throat as it warmed up and be fine. I removed, stripped, cleaned and rebuilt the carbs and the bike ran beautifully for about 4-6 weeks, but has now gone back to its rough running and now won’t even start. I suspect that the cause is rust inside the fuel tank, which is being dragged through and clogging up the carbs but trying (waiting) to find a good condition tank at a reasonable price is not proving fun.

As I no longer ‘need’ the bike I was already looking to sell it, but would other people invest the time and money to try and fix the running problems before selling it or would they just cut their losses on it and sell it on as a spares/repairs/non-runner? I’m imagining that the bike fully running (24k miles, quite a few good upgrades, LOTS of extra spares) would be worth about £1200 at the start of the season and probably only about £700-£800 as a non-running project - does this sound reasonable numbers? Or would people break it for spares and flog it in pieces on eBay/Gumtree?

I promise this is not a badly camouflaged ‘for sale’ post, but a genuine ‘what would you do’. Ordinarily I see fixing things as a challenge to overcome and take great pleasure in getting things sorted and fully working before moving them on - but this one has had me tearing my hair out in frustration.