Pretty nice bike but...needs some work and it's been minimally fluffed. The bad: the underseat area is awfully grungy for a 255 miler, the clutch cover needs a repaint, as does the muffler heat shield (looks like paint was spilled on it) and WTF happened to the LH side of the seat cover? The good: mostly everything else that can be seen.
Mechanically, the worst that might be lurking is a rusted engine top end...if it sat for 34 years with an open valve. You can pretty well figure that the chain, cables and bearings will have some degree of arthritis; most will probably be usable, with lubing. The seat just plain needs restoration. Make no mistake, I'm not bashing this machine just giving a reasonably detailed appraisal based on what can be seen and inferred from the listings. That's a bit of a gamble, so I tend to go conservative. I'd offer $1800, tops - and plan on spending another $300-500 to really bring it back, plus the cost of transportation home and their C-note "doc fee":wank: All-in, you'd have $2200-2700 into this thing by the time it's sitting in your garage, cherried-out and ready to roll.
That's a hefty amount for an `81 but, a smaller bottom line than starting out with a $600-800 clapped-out original and restoring it to the same condition. And, there are a few big positives of laying out the long green for a 250-miler...the lower end of the motor, speedo, switches, etc should all have next to no discernable wear. Thus, even if the top end of the motor is rusted badly, a top end rebuild would give you the closest thing to an NOS engine, numbers-matching, too.
