I spend a fair bit of time talking to breakers. Partly in the never-ending search for reasonably priced parts to keep my shedful of rolling projects... well, rolling, and partly for research for RiDE. Over the years I've got pretty friendly with some of them and once you get past the initial, 'Oh Christ, what does he want this time...?' that comes as a normal consequence of fielding a hundred witless phone calls daily from punters who don't really know what they want (but do know they want it for nothing), they're mostly a friendly bunch. They're also mostly genuinely enthusiastic – it’s not a business you get into expecting to get rich and unless you love bikes in the first place you won't last long.
On the other hand it IS still a business and if it's not going to make most breakers rich, they do need to make a living. And for most of the ones I talk to, that's been getting harder and harder over the past few years. This isn't because customers have less money to spend. If you've got less, you're more likely to spend what you have got with a breaker rather than a dealer if the difference in price decides whether you can afford to fix your bike or not. Anyway, there's plenty of money washing around. The trouble is, it's coming from abroad, and it's buying up used and damaged bikes that would normally have ended up in breakers, and spiriting them away to be repaired or broken overseas.
I called Roy the other day, looking for some bits for the ZX-6R. "I haven't broken one in years," he said. "Can't get them. In fact it's so hard to get stock generally now I can't see how some breakers are going to manage. We're already under pressure from Ebay cowboys, but now people are coming over on the ferry and riding away on bikes that we'd have broken a few years back. Or they come over in vans and buy up half a dozen bikes at a time. In a few years there's going to be a huge gap where anyone running a five to ten-year-old bike won't be able to get used parts any more."
So where's this money coming from? Well, it's partly due to the weak pound - simple economics. But it's also due to the opening up of markets in eastern Europe, some of which haven't got a huge amount of money either, but they do have a raging thirst for the consumer goods they couldn't get for so long, and in particular for performance cars and bikes. There's no large existing pool of affordable vehicles at home, so they're naturally going to go fishing wherever there IS a big pool. And that's exactly what we've had here for the past fifteen years or so.
In the '90s the boot was on the other foot - a strong pound meant UK breakers stocked up on European insurance write-offs, and when over-stocked French and Spanish dealers struggled to shift full-on sportsbikes the parallel importers could step in, buying up the surplus, undercutting official imports, and driving down prices for everyone. I've no doubt that at some point it'll all come full circle and it'll be us snaffling the bargains abroad again. If at that point it's hard to find parts for your '05 Fireblade in UK breakers, that'll be a short-term pain, but if it's also hard to find a UK breaker in the first place, that'll be a long-term disaster.
Kev Raymond
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