I was bummed when I found out that Shame Week was scheduled for Labor Day weekend. I had plans, well in advance, to attend my Grandmother's 90th Birthday party in Connecticut. Plus, I have yet to procure registration for any of my running mopeds here in NYC. Maybe next year...
To cure my no rally woes before the long weekend, I did my usual scan of Ebay and Craigslist for vintage mopeds and moped parts. At about 10pm I saw this posting (below) on Boston's Craigslist selling a 1980 Puch Magnum II for $200. Could this be true!? Nah! I was sure it was a scam but I decided to write an email anyway. The ad was posted just 30 minutes earlier. If this was a legit, then this was my chance to snag a dream project for this fall / winter. I went to sleep later, thinking nothing of my chances of actually owning a Puch Magnum.
The next morning I checked my email to see if I had gotten any response from the seller. No luck. I checked Craigslist again to see if the Puch was still available, expecting to find the listing removed. To my surprise it was still listed, but this time for $300. Taking quick action, I wrote the seller again, making mention of the price change (luckily I had printed a .pdf of the original listing and attached it to my email), letting him know that I'm still interested despite the increase in price. Minutes later I received a call from the seller to find out that I was the first of already 50 emails he had received. He told me that the $200 listing was a mistake made by his son and that he in no way was trying to "pull a fast one" on me. He also realized that he could have probably listed the moped for much more than $300 after the insane response he had been getting since posting the ad. But he was honest with me and said that if someone had done such a thing to him (putting himself in my shoes) he would have been pretty upset. He told me that it would not take much effort to get the Magnum running and the only items missing were a decompression cable, a plastic engine side cover, and a tail light cover. I assured the man that I had experience fixing mopeds and that I would make the 250+ mile trip to Gloucester the next morning to it pick up. I also thanked him for his ethical stance on the matter. Last, I advised him that it might be in his best interest to remove the posting to avoid any harassment. He did not remove the ad.
My girlfriend and took the a train later that morning with our 2 cats to Connecticut. We were staying at my father's house for the weekend to attend the birthday party on Sunday. We left my father's house at about 7am Saturday in my Cherokee to make the trip to Gloucester. Our plan was to spend the day at the beach town of Rockport after picking up our new moped project.
The day went off without a hitch. We found the seller's house without a problem. He told us about the harassing emails and calls he'd received after talking to me the morning before. He had offers much higher than I could have afforded at the time as well as buyers who were much closer in proximity to the seller's address. It was some kind of miracle that the seller had enough faith in me to not flake out and to arrive when we had promised.
The Puch was in "as-advertised" condition and was a fair deal for the money. I had no way at the time of checking the compression on the engine without a functioning decompression cable. I was glad to do business with such an honest man- also of mustache, tattoos, and standing over 6' tall!
My girlfriend and I spent the rest of the afternoon in Rockport. We had beers and burgers at an outdoor restaurant on the coast. We walked the village streets and found a necklace for my Grandmother. We ended the afternoon by wading in the Atlantic while looking for sea glass and fiddler crabs. The weather was perfect too; sunny, clear, with temperatures in the mid 70's. I would have paid $300 for a day vacation such as this. By the end of the day I felt as though the moped was just a throw in bonus.
By the end of the holiday weekend I had driven well over 600 miles. I now have a dream project bike sitting in my living room in Brooklyn. I have big plans for the Puch Magnum II. I will go into more detail in the following posts. I created this blog to let friends, family, strangers, experts, and amateurs track the progress of this project. My hope is that my experience with this moped will serve as some sort of open forum where ideas are shared and something new and interesting has been contributed to moped culture. For those still waiting for their dream moped, have patience, it will eventually pay off. Trust me.
so what's with the magnum now?
ReplyDeleteI have one of these in perfect working condition, but it only hits about 24, so what can i do to get about 35 out of it?
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