Wilsons Sandbox

OK, I currently have Progressive and am about to renew my KLR's insurance, but, get this, Progressive wants $227 for a year, and Allstate gave me a quote of $104 for what looks like identical coverage? A whopping 50% less? Seems too good to be true? I know that insurance has been discussed here in the past, I am wondering if any of you all have seen such a vast price difference? BTW, I have had Progressive for years and no tickets, claims, etc? I am at a loss to understand why such a vast difference in price? Eddie M New Orleans

The cafe racer buzz in the original was basically a bunch of guys taking what were called work a day bike and trying to wring them out to better performance. The drive was....the bikes used were pretty cheap. You see in the late fouties after the war wages in the uk were not so high so working stiffs rode the bus or rode motorcycles. Bikes were much cheaper tha cars partly because the taxes were a lot lower. And the economies of scale had not hit the UK car business as strongly as in the us . Mainly because uk firms were a lot smaller and the nation had a better infrastructure for travel. And the English stayed home . We'll the fifths and ESP the sixties saw dramatic increases in uk std of living so bikes in a wet dreary nation were not popular esp where car taxes dropped and cars like the Morris minor the A 40 and other small cars that were only about 25 to 35 per cent more costly than a car were readily available starting like the mid fifties. So used bike got cheap. Bikes like the norton Alta's had good frames slow motors, triumphs had better motors and crappy frames. They all had heavy steel tanks some with big valanced fenders and the like. So a small industry sprang up making alloy tanks and the like. So younger guys with decent jobs like in the auto Steel, shipbuilding and other industries bought these old bike hacked then and racer hem from cafe to cafe. Out of this came Dunstall, Tracy, Harris making parts then some even bikes. The factories weren't so someone did. And history was made. Now as in all thing good work looks like it is easy.it is not. These things were cheap only because the bikes were and their was no alternative. For the most part this was short lived. The bonniville started the end of the game. The Japanese finished it. Okay there were the odd duck dunstall norton 810 in the 70s but those were the exception proving the rule. The British motorcycle industry died a death of a thousand cuts....demand dropping, factories not embracing the new youth / hot rod market..(for proof the first year BSA rocket 3 looked like it was beat by two very large angry men armed with ugly sticks..the paint was a purple only available to I think American motors for use on the gremlin.) So like today those with less money and less experiance and taste made uglier bikes. From old films it looked like about 80 percent of the cafes were real hack jobs. And the triton really was a true bitch to get right. So much for that...btw this one posted is a very good job. You figure and East thirty pounds of crap were tossed off. With a 685 kit, pipe intake and a mild cam to get to forty two up. That thing would be a blast.