It was a hard decision to make to send her to a shop, but really, it will be a good financial move in the end.  There are a lot of small and easy to fix things wrong with her, but we don’t currently have the know-how to find them or know where to begin.  There are also some major things wrong (her throttle cable is seriously screwed up and her front brake disintegrated), and we’d rather have a professional do the work than end up with the side effects of the hack-job we’d do.  The other factor was weather.  It’s too cold right now to be spending large amounts of time outside working on the bike, and it’s bad for the bike to just sit outside in the parking lot all winter.  The shop will not only fix her, but will also help to keep her out of the weather during the bike’s non-working downtime.

The other thing is that really, once we get her completely fixed and running, it will be much easier to find and deal with problems as they arise.  Right now there are so many small problems that they end up masking eachother, making it difficult to really tell what’s actually wrong with the bike.  Once we get her “zeroed out”, so to speak, it will be easier for us to do the repairs ourselves.  We’ve gotten some flak from the Ural community for trying to “save” a 1992 bike, but really, we both feel that there’s no point in condemning a bike to the parts pile just because it’s old, if all that it needs is a little TLC.

We’ll let you know what the results of her visit to the motorcycle doctor are.  Hopefully by spring she will be in good enough condition to be a daily rider.