bobber project?

hi im new to this whole thing. im looking at buying a 1982 yamaha 650 heritage from a friend and im not to sure what its worth, it has 12,500 miles. here is a picture of the bike as it is now.

i have an idea of kinda what i want to do to the bike, soft tail and blacked out with a tan seat and eventually white wall tires (last three pics on this post is the style i wanna go for, couple came from this site) pretty much would like to know what to do tank wise, seat wise. the front end im not worried about but i want the bike to have the right look to it but i dont know where to start to make the back of the bike look right.

 

The way your engine and tank are designed, I'd go for the Triumph bobber look. Popular mod done with the XS models.
I wanted to do a soft tail mod with my XJ700. I was going to make it look like a hardtail, but use a auto leaf spring instead of a mono-shock to soft tail it.

 

With what Orange said, the bike that your friend wants to sell you, or you are going to buy off of him is an XS650, not an XJ650. Do some looking around for XS650 bobbers, choppers, etc, and you should find the information that you are looking for. The biggest differences between the two bikes are that the XJ bikes are shaft driven 4 bangers and the XS are not. There is a new rag out called Wrench that had a nice article of an XS650 in it, check it out.

 

thank you i will do that. do you guys know what that bike is worth before i say yes to it? they told me they were asking $1000.

 

It would depend on what maintenance has been done or needs to be done. Does it run and how well does it run? Brakes, tires, electrical system....etc.

 

If it runs it might be worth $800. Maybe.

If not, get a compression test.

Be prepared to do a lot of catching up on maintenance; and I would recommend doing that BEFORE you start cutting it up. Worry about how it runs and stops before you start worrying about how it looks.