Bonneville America Forums Forums General Motorcycle Forums Rides, Rallies, & Events Motorcycle Swap meet -observations

There is a large motorcycle swap meet that occurs twice yearly in Keene, NH. They've had a spring and fall swap meet every year for the last 33 years. Well my brothers and I have accumulated various motorcycle parts over the years and thought it would be a good idea to get a table at this swap meet to sell some of these parts. We called the guy who runs this meet and asked him a couple a questions. He was pretty gruff with my brother Rob. He just said show up at 6:00AM on 9/28. First come first serve for a space and it's $45 bucks.

OK, we load up my truck and headout to this shindig on Sunday morning. It's about an hour and half drive from my house in Windham. We get there and there is a long line of U-hauls, trailers, trucks and vans waiting to get into the fairgrounds. I'm a little intimidated but the line starts moving and before we know it we get to the front. We pay our vendor fee of $50 (charged us $5 extra cause we had 3 guys in the truck). Then we pull into the fairgrounds and start to jockey for our spot. We end up getting a spot in the pavillion. There was plenty of space to setup our stuff. I had brought a folding table and 3 folding chairs. We organize the stuff we think is going to sell on the table and put pricing labels on a bunch of items. Pricing this stuff turned out to be useless. These guys haggled over the smallest of crap. Well 9:00 cames and they let the customers into the meet.

Let me just say that this meet was 99.99% Harley stuff. My brothers did pretty well because that's what they were selling. I did ok because I had some Harley mirrors and some ignition wires for Harley but they didn't want my Triumph or Suzuki parts. This show was completely focused on old Harley stuff. Normally I don't have any issues with Harley folks. However, at this show I had some unusual encounters with these folks. I took a lot of ribbing for my Triumph stuff and my Triumph hat. Way more than usual. OK, I can take it and these guys are just Harley snobs. Then we decide to take turns watching the table so we could look around at the other vendors tables. Since it was mostly Harley I volunteer to stay and watch the table and sell. My 2 brothers take off and they're gone about 30 mins. when they return they're just shaking their heads and laughing. Apparently, they ran into some real smart a$$e$ while shopping around. For example, they'd see an old Knuckle Head engine on the guys table and they ask how much for the engine. The guy would say, "it's not for sale" "Ha, Ha", no one sells old knuckle head engines. They'd see a shovel head and ask how much. The guys would laugh and say "it's not for sale." This happened over and over. It just wasn't engines or bikes but any rare part or accessory. It was if they liked busting guys balls. Kinda their badge of honor to display what they had and you couldn't get. Very strange mentality and it really started to get to my brothers. I just hung out at the table. We did manage to sell a lot of stuff because our stuff was actually for sale. This meet had a lot of One percenters of various affiliations and was little bit of an eyeopener for us. I'm not sure we'll rush back to this swap meet but learned a few things and made some cash so it wasn't totally bad.

Keene can be a weird swap, I totally don't understand why you would bring something that you didn't want to sell, but I've encountered those guys at every swap I hit. I do usually find a few deals there though, yesterday I was able to pick up a cheap pair of shocks and a few cheap headlights for the hoarders stash. did you have modern triumph stuff? Must have totally passed by you, didn't notice anyone with brit stuff - what kind of goodies did you have? For all it's weird downsides, Keene is usually a good place to pick up some cheap goodies.

That's not an unusual situation around here either, Ron. This Keene Swap Meet sounds a lot like the meets in Long Beach and Ventura California. Mostly Harley stuff, and mostly Harley riders who wouldn't know a nice clean old Z1 Kawasaki from a nice clean old Moto Guzzi Ambassador, to a nice clean old BMW R60/2 without the tanks badges attached to each of 'em. And you can forget about any of 'em ever even HEARIN' of, say, a Moto Morini or a maybe a Laverda in their closed off little world!!!

In other words...there's a whole passel of clueless folks there, who seem to know only one name in all of motorcycling...and guess which one THAT is, dude?!!!


And THEN on the other hand around here there is the annual Vintage M/C Swap Meet and Show which just took place a week ago right across the street from me at the local El Camino Community College, and where you might find a part for just about any and every motorcycle brand ever produced in this world for the last 60 years, and where the clientele tend to be a very well informed and eclectic bunch of folks. In fact, last week there where probably as many folks sportin' Triumph T-shirts there as there were Harley T-shirts. And NOT surprisingly, you could probably strike up a conversation with just about anybody there, EVEN some of those sportin' H-D T-shirts, and NOT surprisingly you'd probably find them to be very knowledgeable about the WHOLE WIDE friggin' WORLD of motocycling TOO!!!

Yep. "Shocking", ain't it?!

(and some people wonder why I "seem" to have so little respect for the "average" Harley rider..."could it be" that the "Moron Ratio" tends to be just a mite HIGHER around some o' them there folks???!!!)


(OH! and BTW...there WAS a BEAUTIFUL '57 Harley KR Flattracker there that I would have bought in a friggin' HEARTBEAT ...that is IF I had the 18 Large the dude wanted for it!!!)

I've got some good deals at Keene before but I went with an old guy last time and all he did was complain about how it used to just be parts. And I think he's right, way too many doo rags and lifestyle crap. And yes 99.999% HD stuff.

"It's not for sale Francis" Pee Wee Hermon

Remember the bikers in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Sure hope you can dance.

Funny you should mention Pee Wee there, Paul!

The folks I was walkin' around that El Camino Show with walked past this absolutely cool old Harley Knucklehead Chopper, and as we finished inspecting it, the dude who owned it walked up and started it and rode away on it.

The funny part o' this is that the dude didn't look like anything you'd expect the owner to look like. He was about all of 140lbs soakin' wet, all done up in 1950 period leather kind'a like Brando in "The Wild One", and I SWEAR looked JUST LIKE little ol' Pee Wee himself!

(we all looked at each other and started chucklin')