In looking at motorbikes it looks like the Honda Shadow 750 is a good choice for a starter bike. I looked at one in the Honda showroom the other day and it was larger than I expected. Although I am a large man I have to admit the size and weight of these machines intimidates me somewhat. I have absolutely no motorcycle riding experience and at age 50 I figure if I don’t get with it soon I never will.
I will obviously take a class at the DMV before proceeding. It might be more prudent to start of one of the Honda Rebel 250s, but those might be a touch small.
If I’m looking at 750 class Honda what else should I be looking at? In looking at reviews and opinions some consider the Honda 750s non-fuel injection based engine technology dated while others think Honda has the best build quality.
I have always thought the 750 was a terrible starter bike, it is very powerful. Easy to ride with a bit of experience but I know one guy who bought one, and sold it three weeks later and now won’t ride anything. Maybe he wasn’t a bike guy. The 250 is way too small if you are a big guy. Have you considered a 400?
BTW I am 57 and weigh in at 270 and am really happy with a 650.
I have a Moto Guzzi 750 and I love it. My son, who is 27, has a Honda Shadow 750. I’ve ridden it but prefer my Guzzi for city riding. It is more nimble. I haven’t had the Honda on the open road but suspect I would prefer it to my Guzzi. It sits more comfortably and I think, for the longer ride, I would experience less fatigue. My son had ridden the Honda from here (Brisbane) to Townsville, a trip of about 1500 Km or about 1000 miles. He experienced little discomfort.
But we are both experienced riders. He’s been riding for about six years and has heaps of kilometers under his belt. I’ve been riding for over thirty-five years (I’m sixty-five) and have probably over 20 000 kilometers experience on road trips alone. I would probably not recommend a 750 as my first bike. If you do the training course, they will test you on different sized bikes. Probably a 600 will fit you without overpowering you.
My only experience with the Shadow 750 was during some Honda demo rides, and, personally, I found the Shadow woefully under-powered. I really had to crank on it to get it to keep up with the crowd. And this coming from a guy who was used to a 78 Suzi GS750 in desperate need of a tune.
In the Shadow’s defence, there’s the possibility that it needed tuning, and would’ve been capable of more.
Honestly, my GS750 was my first (and only so far) street bike, and I don’t think it was too much bike for me, aside from my finding it a bit top-heavy.
A really nice, well-balanced bike, IMHO, is the 1982 Honda Nighthawk 750. handled much better than the 84, which, to that point, was my favorite used bike.
My first bike was a Kawasaki Vulcan 750, which is (was, they stopped making it) a direct competitor to the Shadow 750. The Vulcan 750 is a bit stronger than the Shadow 750. I agree with Satellite^Guy, the time I rode the Shadow, I thought it was a bit under powered. Saying that, it probably is reliable and pretty easy to ride.
My recommendation is to take the DMV or ABATE class. Something that gets you several hours of seat time on a real bike. Even though you’ll just be going around a parking lot, the experience is invaluable.
Then, once you have your license, go to dealers and look at lots of used bikes. And ride lots of used bikes. I mean, anything that the dealer will let you take a spin on, do it. My first time ever riding on the street was a dealer demo of a Ninja 250. That was scary after doing my class on a Kawasaki Eliminator 125. Just a month after buying the Vulcan, I test rode a Rebel 250, and knew I’d made the right choice in getting the larger bike. I do think the Ninja 250 is a great bike, but the Rebel 250 (I think it wasn’t running right) and the Eliminator 125 were just too slow for anything except around town.
You might find that the leg forward position of a cruiser (like the Vulcan and the Shadow) is uncomfortable, and you prefer something more standard. Or that the lightness of a single cylinder dual sport is just what you want, but you won’t know until you ride them. Don’t rule anything out, except crazy fast stuff that will kill you, which does include most (but not all) 600cc inline 4 powered bikes.
Also, this is your first bike, not your last bike. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and probably shouldn’t be. Get something that already is scratched up, so when you drop it in a parking lot, you can just shrug it off. I thought the Vulcan 750 was a fantastic bike, with enough guts for long highway cruises, but small enough to not completely overwhelm a beginner, but after a few years and a few thousand miles I bought a different bike to replace it. I like my current bike, a BMW R1150R, but I hope it isn’t my last bike.
It really depends on what type of bike. I had a Honda Shadow 600 as my first bike and didn’t think it was too much nor too little. For a bigger guy I would think a 750 would be pretty good. The Shadows are also very good bikes. I couldn’t kill mine, nor could the deer I hit.
I would say if you want a cruiser, then look between a 500-800cc bike. I wouldn’t go with a 250, my ex had one and it wouldn’t even get up to 60. I think, but don’t remember the exact details, that Harley had a promotion that you buy one of their smaller bikes, and if you brought it back within a year to upgrade they would pay you the price you originally paid for it. That might be something to look into, if you thought you might want to stay with it. I do however agree that used is the way to go, because you will drop the damn thing at some point doing something stupid.
1 - Agree completely on the advice (not quoted) to take the ABATE (or as it’s called around here, the MSF BRC, for Motorcycle Safety Foundation Basic Rider Course) class. It’s an intensive, coached, start-from-scratch intro to motorcycling, they provide 250cc bikes to learn on, and passing the skills test at the end is good in most states for a road test waiver in getting licensed to ride. They fill up really fast this time of year so act quickly!
2 - Funny you should mention those two bikes in particular. I have a Vulcan 750 now, it’s my first motorcycle after 3 years of riding scooters, and I love it completely. With an aftermarket seat, for me it’s just right in terms of power and agility for what I do (mostly in-city commuting, the occasional long highway jaunt). I got a used one with 24K miles on it last summer, put over 3,000 miles on it in 9 months (including the wintertime), and just bought a newer one with 550 miles on it because I decided I wanted to invest in a long-term keeper.
BUT, I’ve also got my eye on the BMW R1150R as a future stablemate. A bit out of my financial ability to take on right now, but a used one is likely coming my way within the next 5 years or so.
I’m an experienced rider and have been a “Shadow loyalist” pretty much the whole time I’ve been riding.
I love it for it’s drive shaft (as oppossed to chain drive bikes) it makes for a wonderfully smooth ride.
Not sure what people are talking about with the whole “under powered” thing. I mean sure, pretty much any crotch rocket will beat you off the mark. But I’ve never really cared about all that. All I know is, it has got more than enough power to get you onto a fast moving highway safely.
Call it under powered if you want but it will still beat any car off the mark. So I guess “power” is all relative.
As a rider that’s in between being a completely clueless novice and less clueless novice (about 15 kmiles in two years). Don’t get a new bike for your first, take the class, don’t get a bike that you think that you’ll “grow into”.
I made the mistake of getting a Vulcan 900 (custom) brand new for my first bike and I got myself into situations that I was unprepared to deal with and by sheer force of luck I managed not to destroy myself. Seriously poor decisions while riding that should have left me a pulpy mass on the side of a highway. If I could go back I would get something with less weight and less torque.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my bike, but I see now that there is plenty of time to get a different/better bike and I should have used better judgment when selecting my first.
I also own a Vulcan 900 Custom and second everything Red Skeezix said. Luckily, I bought it as my second bike (which I adore, btw), after I practiced for several months on a Suzuki GZ 250, which helped immensely. Although I quickly outgrew the 250, I am so glad I did my learning on it, as there are situations I got myself in with that that I’m sure I would have been fucked had I owned my 900 then–such as nearly dropping it several times (it’s much easier to save something that weighs 250lb, as opposed to nearly 600), as well as some tight-cornering, for which I lacked the proper experience and skills.
It seems to be fairly common knowledge (that I discovered after already purchasing a bike), that used “starter bikes” which are mechanically sound and safe to ride hold their value very well since every year there is a new crop of riders looking for a less expensive way to learn the sport. Some times you can even resell one these bikes within a few hundred dollars less than what you originally paid for it.
Yeah, “under powered” is definitely a relative thing. The Shadow 750 accelerates fine, and can certainly go fast enough to leave other traffic behind. I think my comment on the Shadow is due to the Vulcan 750 having a bit more power, being a bit lighter, having a broader torque curve, or something like that which gives it the feeling of a bit more pep.
If I was looking for a small (the Vulcan 750 was considered a medium when it came out in the mid 80s) cruiser I would take any of the metric models in the 600-800cc range if the price and condition where right.
I found that to be true. I more than doubled the mileage on my Vulcan, and sold it privately for only a few hundred dollars less than I bought it from a dealer three years earlier. Of course that few hundred dollars does not include maintenance and repairs. 7000 miles in 13 years, or whatever the bike had when I bought, had certainly taken their toll in neglect. What I sold was a much better bike than what I bought, as most of what was going to fail soon, had done so on me. I hope the next owner enjoys it as much as I did.
My brother is actually selling his starter bike, a Virago 700, back to the friend who he bought it from, for almost what he bought it (the guy wants to keep it at his second house, or something). It’s a similar situation, in that he’s probably selling a better bike than what he bought, due to the work he had done to it, but the total cost of ownership for the years he’s had it will work out to probably $2-300/year.
And finally, one thing I noticed, and I’m no expert, though I like to go on and on…
Low mileage isn’t always best. A two year old bike with 3000 miles is probably great. A 10 year old bike with 5000 probably had those all put on in two or three years, and sat neglected for long stretches of time. If somebody rides that little, do you think they changed the oil when it’s only been 800 miles (but a year) since the last time they changed it? Maybe they took great care of it, or maybe it had the same acidic sludge in it for four years in a row.
It also probably hasn’t been ridden enough recently to break anything that is near breaking. That’s what happened with my Vulcan. Within the first six months I owned I discovered all kinds of hidden problems. Most of them were pretty straightforward, just annoying, occasionally expensive, and worst, cut into valuable riding time. It was things such as, rubber hoses failing because they had dried out, electrical wires breaking at rubbed spots, crud getting sucked into the carburettors, slow leaks at the valve stems, etc.
So, don’t be scared off a six year old bike with 25,000 miles. It (hopefully) has had the oil changed a couple times per year, had other regular maintenance done to it, and the bad-from-the-factory final drive failed at 15,000 miles, and was long ago repaired.
Motorcycle noob checking in here. I took the MSF class at the beginning of April (at age 46 and never having ridden a bike before) and then spent the next couple weekends looking at bikes. A couple of the dealers that I went to, I felt like they were trying to push me towards unreasonably larger bikes than I felt like I was ready for, i.e. 750s or 800s. Maybe because they didn’t have anything smaller in stock, I don’t know. One dealer had a Kawasaki Vulcan 500 that seemed like a good fit, as well as a used Honda Shadow 600 (650 maybe?) which they apparently don’t make anymore. However, I wound up getting myself a Yamaha V-Star 250 and for now I think it is plenty of bike for me. I’m 6’0 and about 170 lbs and am mostly riding it in town, not on the highway. Someone taller, heavier, or planning on doing highways riding might want something bigger. Check out the 500! (I’ve already got my eye on it as my next bike! :D)
