A difficult question I know without any guide on make/model and whether a green book exisits or not - but can anyone offer thoughts on pricing a non runner being bought as a project - nothing special just a project to learn on.

I've seen a Honda something? (no, no pictures yet) that might be suitable for a learning project.

When I have a model to look up I'm guessing I might be able to find an online price for the year then offer about a 1/3 of that, if there is paperwork on offer. If not about 500 Baht as scrap?

Thoughts welcomed.

Take the estimated worth of the bike (online price) minus the estimated repair parts costs and there you have the value

Getting an accurate list of all the bad part or things wrong, the researching the costs for these items with Honda will give you the repair cost.

If the bike is a couple of years old and only worth 15,000 baht and the repair parts are 10,000 the offering price would be 5,000 or less (less because of time/labor) involved to fix it

If you do not do an accurate job of identifying and costing all bad parts, you will end up over paying

I'm no mechanic. 500 baht sounds good.

iF ITS A tHAI OWNER THE PRICE WILL STILL BE HIGH. BECAUSE THEY DO Not sell unless they have to. they are hoarders.

Without more detail no one can say.. But a non runner without book is pure junk value.. Few 1000 tops.

I have paid +- 15k for clean running bookless bikes.

To buy a non running i Thailand is a bit like buying a lottery ticket (you seldom win). You will not know for sure what is wrong with the bike before you open it up. A Honda Wave will be relative cheap to fix as you can buy used/new parts all over the Kingdom.

Thing is any bikes thats had any attempted fixing will be brutally hard to ever get 'right' again..

As theres no supply chain for parts they just bodge any old bearings, pistons etc in there, gaps are never mic'ed properly, and the whole thing is a waste.. I have done a few rebuilds here and every time you stop one apart theres just the 'what the hel_l have they done here' feeling to the whole process.

Difficult to guage. If its a Thai bike (meaning a bike that you could buy through retail here in the past), you will be able to get parts for it easily and cheaply. So you can cost up what you believe is wrong with it, but I have to agree with LivinLOS; you will most certainly find other things wrong with it. Imported bikes are a totally different ball game, and one I have decided to avoid for a number of reasons (parts and the illegality being the main ones). Thais mechanics are very ingeious at avoiding buying parts!

If you can get a Thai bike mega cheap, then its worth doing it if you have the inclination to fix it up. For the three of bikes I have fixed up, I have found allocating a budget of about 5000 baht is the minimum to fix up issues. The other hidden cost is future repairs; I mean not in a year or two, but other issues that will come up after a couple of months. The way I have looked at it in the past is that something like a new cbr150 would cost you 60,000 baht new, maybe 30,000 for a second hand one 5/6 years old. For the old 2 strokers I have rebuilt they costed between 5000 to 10,000 baht and then you add on another 5k to fix them up. Its still half the price of a decent 2nd hand bike, with some interesting work in rebuilding the bike.

The smart way to go now is the new (or nearly new) big bike Kawasakis. Legal big Thai bikes which you can gets parts for easily, plus the dealer servicing, etc. Lets hope the other manufacturers follow suite.

To follow up this thread, all I wanted was a first bike project to play with, the single cylinder (CC unknown) Honda Super Sprint (?) seemed like an easy choice. The owner wanted 4,000 Baht for it with no paperwork.

I laughed - happy in the knowledge that it will still be there for years to come with the owner considering that it's only a few more years before the dust covered resting place for discarded boxes will be sold.

I hear that basic running bikes go for about 1,000 Baht locally. I'll hold on to my 500 Baht budget for the right bike to come along.