| Author | Message | ||
     Whodom |
Decker & Bluz: 2002 was the last year for S3's also. The 2000 M2's and S3's are good too and only require a few minor updates to bring them up to 2002 specs (shift linkage, muffler mount, & primary "shoe" ). | ||
| Bluzm2 |
Hugh, I know,,,, check my profile!  The 2000's have a couple of other things too. Like the rocker box gaskets, etc. The crank and cylinders are different also. The 2001 - 02 had a slightly stronger crank (I don't remember the exact details..) and the cylinder liners were dimpled to prevent movement in the aluminum "fins". The 2001 had a different wiring harness also. It was hidden a bit better than the 2000 M2. | ||
| Iamike |
Decker- You are a smart person (coming from a '99 S3 owner). If they made a new one (tube frame) with the new motor in it I would have bought it in a flash. If you are looking for a commuter that XB9sx (City X) looks like a winner to me. | ||
| Iamike |
Hey Brad- What are you doing Thu. - Sun.? We are taking a trip down to Arkansas and have room for a couple more riders. | ||
| Bluzm2 |
Mike, I would love to go! But... If I did, I wouldn't have a wife when I got back. Really, I would like to go but because of the Dad situation, I really can't. I'm the only family in town right now so I have to take care of things till others return. I do get a lot of saddle time though running back and forth to the nursing home... Are you concerned about the tropical storms heading toward that region? Brad | ||
| Decker |
actually, there just happens to be a buell demo ride going on this saturday at the hd shop i bought my sportster. so i'll be able to get over there and ride  since my sportster got totalled i've been restless... i like the harley engine and transmission, so i think i would like the buells too. my vstrom is nice but i don't feel the same about it, it a nice sitting posture but, it just doesn't feel like the sportster did. | ||
| Crashm1 |
Brad, I hope your Father is getting better. I also hope you are staying sane through this. | ||
| Bartimus |
"They do, its now called the Lighting and comes in 2 flavors, XB9 or XB12"  NO WYCKED, Buell no longer makes a THUNDERBOLT. Get it right!!! Buell did NOT change the name of the Thunderbolt, they were making Lightnings (S1)right along with the T'bolt (S2, S3). Perhaps the Firebolt replaced the T'bolt. I guess that would be up for discussion... The S3 was the last of the Thunderbolts.  | ||
| Smokedaddy |
Wednesday July 6, 7:00 pm ET Donna Howell South Florida businessman David Pearl II wondered why some foreign sales were slowing for refrigeration testing manifolds made by his company, Uniweld Products. A check of stores told him. Counterfeits were being sold at 40% to 50% off. Shoddy knockoffs, which turned out to be from China, bore packaging identical to Uniweld's. Right down to an American flag and Made-In-U.S.A. imprint. ADVERTISEMENT "It was a big shock," said Pearl, executive vice president at Uniweld, a family business in Fort Lauderdale. "The loss of sales hurts immediately and the damage to your reputation lasts forever." Owners big and small are becoming counterfeit victims more and more as global trade and technology expand. Look-alikes steal sales and hurt the product's image. At worst, they endanger lives, such as the fake brake pads blamed for a deadly school bus crash and bogus cell phone batteries that explode. So makers of goods are going all out now, hiring high tech investigators and teams of lawyers to ferret out fakes and curb future frauds. It's an expensive game of whack-a-mole. Some brand owners say they've been able to thwart counterfeiting through aggressive tactics. But others say it's only a matter of time until the copycats catch up. Estimates suggest counterfeiting accounts for 5% to 10% of global trade, says Glen Gieschen, managing director of Gieschen Consultancy, a counterfeit monitoring firm in Calgary, Canada. It tabulated seizures of more than 5 million counterfeit items worth $560.3 million in June alone. An analysis late last year by Gieschen found the most profitable items to counterfeit -- outside financial instruments -- were CDs, DVDs and software, and after that clothing and accessories and computer equipment and supplies. But all sorts of things are counterfeited, from cigarettes to motorcycles. GM Daewoo (NYSE:GM - News) filed a lawsuit in December over extreme similarities between one of its autos and a Chinese make. An analysis found the vast majority of parts to be interchangeable, said GM Daewoo. It claims trade secrets were copied. Gieschen says production of fakes is on the upswing. "Counterfeiting is getting worse because of a number of factors," he said. "One is technology." Modern tools make technology easier to manufacture look-alikes of branded products and copy packaging, Gieschen says. And it makes items easier to sell too, by Internet and mail order. "Auctions, for example, allow an individual to get involved in selling counterfeit goods," he said. "Sometimes without even knowing it." All Roads Lead To China China is the source for many fakes. Officials there are complaining about China's recent addition to a U.S. priority watch list over intellectual property rights violations. They say China is making progress in crackdowns. Still, the specter of counterfeiting and other kinds of intellectual property violations gives pause to companies thinking about joint ventures in the burgeoning nation. Bigger companies spend millions countering fakes. Theoretically hard-to-copy insignias, holograms and other identification tags are going onto merchandise these days as brand owners look for the best ways to verify authenticity. "Some brand owners are having giant problems, the drug companies in particular, and the cigarette companies," Gieschen said. "Some of the very large (designer brands) like Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Chanel -- it's in the millions of dollars they're spending for a number of activities, and brand protection is part of it." He says several have teams of investigators, managing other teams of investigators around the globe, or are employing independent investigators such as Kroll. Callaway Golf (NYSE:ELY - News), a maker of uniquely designed, patented golf clubs, is one poster child for the lengths companies go to in brand protection. What it spends annually on anti-counterfeiting activities is "probably a seven-figure number," said Stu Herrington, director of security and investigations for the Carlsbad, Calif., firm. He also says counterfeiting has gotten worse. It used to be that copycats tried to make clubs similar to Callaway's but didn't pass them off as the Callaway brand. "We spent a lot of time in the '90s fighting that and we got a reputation for being pretty tough," Herrington said. But over the past two to three years, he says the problem has been out-and-out counterfeits. "As China's manufacturing capacity has developed they've come to where they're pretty sophisticated," he said. "It really became a problem with the Internet, globalization, the world becoming smaller and trans-Pacific shipping becoming cheaper, the tourist business." Early last year Callaway teamed with other golf manufacturers to fight counterfeiting. Complaints filed by the group led to a February raid by Chinese authorities on 4 factories and 18 stores, seizing more than $1 million worth of goods. "A lot of companies have asked us to monitor how their brands are being used online," said Todd Bransford, vice president of marketing at Cyveillance, an online risk-monitoring firm in Arlington, Va., that counts about 200 blue-chip companies as customers. Three years ago Cyveillance did little work with drug makers. "Now we work with the top three. They're very concerned with trying to control the online distribution of their drugs," Bransford said. The World Health Organization puts earnings from counterfeit and substandard drugs in the tens of billions of dollars annually. Last year the Food and Drug Administration started 58 counterfeit cases vs. 30 in 2003. One case cited in a May FDA report involved counterfeit Viagra worth more than $5.65 million. Fears of fakes and damage they could cause to people and profit are among reasons the drug industry is starting to use radio frequency identification (RFID) tag systems to trace the manufacture, distribution and sale of drugs. What lengths do other kinds of companies go to? LVMH, the French parent of designer goods maker Louis Vuitton and several other luxury brands, has 60 people fighting fakes with investigators and attorneys. LVMH says Asian counterfeiting networks have been dismantled, goods seized and legal action taken in several cases. Retail consultant Howard Davidowitz, of New York-based Davidowitz & Associates, says the people buying counterfeits aren't necessarily customers of the brands being faked. "Louis Vuitton is the leader ...in trying to protect its products and reputation," he said. "But if I look at this on a global basis, Louis Vuitton has never done better. It couldn't be killing the business. We're in the greatest run of luxury goods sales in the history of the U.S." In the shadow of counterfeiting concerns, some industries are changing how they market. Unauthorized copies of new movies show up for sale very quickly on many Asian streets and for viewing online. So now many big films open on the same day around the world. In February, Warner Home Video announced a joint venture with a Chinese DVD distributor and said it would try offering DVDs for sale in China shortly after a film's U.S. debut, for a retail price of just $2.65. Other companies have moved toward country-specific pricing, too. Microsoft has had problems with piracy and counterfeiting in Latin America. Even some outfits that sell computers pre-load them with illegitimate Windows copies. So Microsoft in June launched a low-cost, light version of its operating system in Mexico, called Windows XP Starter Edition. It's also in some other developing markets.  -SD: | ||
| Bomber |
while the heartbreak of owning a fake golf club is beyond my ken, I DO know a fair amount about medication counterfeiting -- it can be deadly -- please be careful out there, especially when getting "re-imported" medications from outside the US -- many companies shipping these prodcuts from Canada are not in Canada at all, and the products they shipp never landed there . . . . | ||
| Bluzm2 |
Scott (CrashM1), Thanks much for the thought. It's been a rough road. It's really hard to see a parent go through this type of thing. To paraphrase my Dad, "Strokes suck, don't have one". Yes, there are days I question my sanity..... Brad | ||
| Decker |
i just found this website http://www.mybuell.com/ i also noticed on some of the profiles on this board there are some problems w/the blast. is it just the blast? what about the lightning/firebolt? how is the reliability of buell for the current models? i know hd had some quality issues during the the eighties but apparently that's been overcome.. (im guessing) has buell addressed quality/reliability issues? | ||
| Reepicheep |
What! Somebody somewhere on the web posted some sort of rant about a bad experience they have had with a manufacturer product? Oh my goodness! That person has been out there forever. Ignore that site, it's a plain old fashioned smear job. If you want more reliability data, people here will be honest with you, but stick to people that have been around enough that you get a sense of personality, to see how much of a whiner they are. If it was somebody who popped up, posted a few rants, then dissapeared, take what they say with a grain of salt. Pick any bike brand and you can find plenty of web horror stories about exploding transmissions, exploding wheel hubs, cracking frames, dropping valves, non sealing rings, blowing seals, electrical nightmares, etc. There were reliability issues with the tube framers, but they were worth it. You can look at my profile for a moderately worse then average 25k tuber ownership experience. Note though, that when I sold it at 25k, it was arguably in better "reliability" shape then when I bought it, everything that broke on it had an improved factory part waiting for me at the dealer that basically solved the problem. That in itself says something significant about the changes at Buell between 1999 and 2003 (when the tubers went away). The XB's are even better (if you don't mind a smaller frame) in terms of "being worth it", but without the reliability issues. I have 5k on my xb9sx now. The tach sometimes does not sweep all the way over on the "boot up" dog and pony show. The bike ran badly for 15 minutes after I had routed a wire bundle incorrectly after swapping ECM's, took me about 2 minutes to find it. Thats it. I won't even begin to talk about what my old Cyclone had done by 5k miles, and in terms of "amount of work to fix problems", my old Cyclone was not that much different then my old Yamaha I had before it. Beware when you research things on the internet, that people will almost always post some sort of a rant to vent with any even remotely bad experience, but rarely post "I just rolled another 1000 miles on today, and nothing broke, and dropped by the dealer to get a part, and they knew what it was and had it in stock". Based on my 5k mile experience so far, I fully expect my XB9SX to go 50k miles without significant issues, which is very good for a motorcycle. In that amount of time, aside from normal maintenance, I doubt I will do more them replace a stator, clutch cable, and maybe a bearing / seal or two. Time to go ride mine . I still pack tools on it, but they now are there to help other stranded bikers (a Yamaha R1 and a custom cruiser so far). The cruiser I could help, he had just rattled an exhaust bolt off, and I had wire we could use to tie it back in place until he could get home. The Yamaha R1 owner was screwed, he had some sort of bottom end crank knock that sounded like a death rattle. I felt bad for him, he told me he had just put it together after tearing down the whole bike to fix some sort of problem with the valves. | ||
| Bomber |
there's a Blast in my motorpool -- while some have reported difficulties with that model, ours has been as reliable as an anvil -- even fetching up against a tree didn't faze the thing! XBs are reported to have an almost unbelievably low warrenty rate -- while there's nothing that the hand of man can build that's perfect, the XB series has proven to be very trouble free indeed -- | ||
| M1combat |
15K miles, XB12R, One failed trans output shaft seal. Replaced under warranty in about 45 minutes on a Saturday morning walk-in. I did break one belt, but that was while landing a jump... I ride it pretty hard. | ||
| Madsx |
That site about Buell problems has been around for a while. I found it after buying my Blast in '03. Havent found may more I must say. Have not had any problems with my Blast or XB. | ||
| Spike |
Hopkins Fastest At Halfway Point Of Extended First MotoGP Practice At Laguna Seca http://www.roadracingworld.com/news/article/?article=23376 | ||
| Captlusk |
I have not been on the board in a long time so this question may have been addressed already. Sorry if that's the case. How is the riding position on the new smaller Buels for a taller rider? 6'02, 34 inch inseam. 220lbs. Are these bikes too small for me? Thanks... | ||
| Bertman |
6' 1", 200lbs, 34 inch inseam. My first long ride of 400 miles up and back to Hollister the other weekend and I can say the leg position on my XB12R is a non factor. Didn't bother me at all, even though everyone (non Buell riders) told me it was too small of a bike. | ||
| Benm2 |
Spike, Rossi's spending his time wisely by admiring the "countryside" and watching the lap times. He'll win, of course. ( ...sigh...) BEST of luck to Colin & Nicky! The Yamaha's in the old black & yellow look AWESOME!!!!!! Plus Kenny senior's there, and Shwantz... Makes me wish I were in California. I'll just close my eyes, and tap my heels three times... "There's no place like the US GP" "There's no place like the US GP" "There's no place like the US GP" | ||
| Court |
Anybody have an e-mail for Danny Goldsmith? | ||
| Crazyhorse |
Nicky and Colin 1&2 US GP WooooooooHooooooo | ||
| Edv |
I wish I could have been there to see it but just knowing it happened makes me feel good. Go Nicky!!! | ||
| Iamike |
... I ride it pretty hard. Don, that is an understatement! | ||
| Jima4media |
Just got back from the best motorcycling experience of my life. And I shared it with 140,000 friends at Laguna Seca. We are going to be talking about this one for the next year, until it is time for the next one. Too tired to type a lot tonight. It took 4 1/2 hours of sitting around and then almost 2 hours of driving home to get out of there. But I am probably one of the first home of the people I met from parts East from Conn, to Florida, Alabama, Texas, Wisconsin, and more. Blake is still here with me, and maybe he will have more to say tonight. Americans ruled the day in MotoGP and AMA Superbike, and not by a small amount! Jim P.S. Court, I'll see if I have Danny's email here. | ||
| Eeeeek |
I saw how they did the math to come up with 140,000 Daily attendance: Friday - 40,000 Saturday - 50,000 Sunday - 55,000 By my math, that's 55,000 total people. Still, a huge crowd and the track was not at all prepared for it. I'm not saying I didn't have the time of my life, I just see areas for huge improvements. Vik P.S. Cecil was at the Buell dinner on Friday. | ||
| Ezblast |
LOL - yeah - I saw him shaking hands with Erik! GT - JBOTDS! EZ  | ||
| Jb2 |
We watched the race from the comfort of our humble abode here in the Hoosier state. We stayed glued to the TV hoping to see just one of the many BadWeBbers in attendance around the track but SPEED showed almost no crowd shots or pans. Congrats to Nicky but since the race was so boring we had hoped they might do some fan interviews considering the sellout and the enthusiasm. I figgered there would be, at the very least, someone here would have posted pics and stories in the Tale Section. Okay, so who's got the photos of Ferris and Cecil with their arms around each other and their Nevada Pale Ales raised high? | ||
| Danny |
dee ess thenumbertwo ess pee em sea at pacbelldotnet Now I'll go check my mail edited for anti-spam (Message edited by Danny on July 11, 2005) | ||
| Davegess |
I have never been to Laguna but it must be pretty small if 55000 people is a sell out. I would thing Road Amerca could handle 100000 pretty easily. The 30,000 or so at the RA AMA races seems to be a pretty small crowd. It's been a long time since I went to any onther events up there but I seem to remeber the CART races drawing close to 100,000 people on one day. I could be wrong about that. |
