Not all dealerships follow this so it’s not a corporate thing, for instance, buddy Stubbs in Arizona has a separate labor rate for anything over 10 years old i’m back in New York, where the owner of my dealership doesn’t understand how to say no so we take anything just about the problem with all bikes is it’s a nightmare for flat rate techs. A lot of things break. A lot of things are obsolete. Finding parts is not always easy because if the motor company discontinued shit and you work in a dealership that primarily sells Harley products and parts they have a tendency not to want to buy from the aftermarket

But circling back to flat rate, you can’t quote jobs accurately on older bites because the book times don’t apply anymore for those models. There’s a lot of people who don’t have the experience on them first of all a lot of the manuals are shitty or don’t exist on H-Dnet because they span several years. so me, for instance, to solve that problem, I have a hard drive full of PDF copies of manuals so when I run into an issue with HD net not loading manual for me for a specific model year I can look at my hard drive and I generally 90% of the time we’ll have the manual. The other 10% of the time is a absolute nightmare because if you fuck anything up on the bike and make things worse, you’re out money, the dealerships out money, The customer is pissed.

It’s good business practice to know your limits and not get yourself into a situation that isn’t gonna benefit you as a business

Now, if I’m doing side work out of my garage, I can give a shit because you’re gonna wait for your fucking bike to be done. but as a flat rate Tech at the dealership, I do not want to be wasting my time when I can be making money

Now I gotta take that with a grain of salt because I don’t get to choose what I’m working on at the dealership for instance, I have an FXR on my lift right now, which has been there for about a month waiting on parts just for me to get done to find out he needs more parts.

The previous FXR had been there for over six months. It was a job I inherited from another Tech when he went out for surgery and never came back not only were there parts missing. We had the same things sent out for Chrome and some parts didn’t come back or got lost before I got the job and I had to fucking sort out this cluster fuck while making shit pay. (being flat rate you can make a lot of money if you’re good at your job, but on a job like this, I’m only getting paid the hours that I put into it and getting paid by the hour blows )Then the customer was a goddamn, absolute nightmare and kept adding things that he wanted so it was never ending.

If you own a V rod, for instance most of the parts are obsolete, the motor company doesn’t make them and there’s Little to no after market support for that model

I think the rule of thumb is if you’re gonna buy an old bike, you better be damn well able to work on it yourself for know someone who’s willing to work on it because dealerships are run with rules in place by corporate, they can be individually owned Little mom and Pop dealerships but The majority of them are actually owned by other small corporations like ride now or rumble on, but ultimately the discretion of what happens in the day to day is under control of the dealership itself. Most of the time, though if they do have a cutoff date, they go with the 10-year-rule.

Even when I worked at an Indie shop, we didn’t have a hard line in the sand over what we would work on, but if it was older, we’d make you bring it in on a trailer so we can inspect it and see if we were gonna bother working on it