The main point of the C.I. Bullet is that it provides an affordable taste of motorcycling's past. A pre-unit machine with a 50+ year production run means parts availability. Pushrods & about 6 bolts and the top end is off. The transmission guts can be in your hands in an hour. Even the bottom end can be taken apart, a new pin, bushing & con rod installed, line up the crank halves by rolling across the flattest surface you got India-style and it'll run OK, at least for awhile. You can invest a lot of time, money & effort and it'll run very well indeed, but it's a labor of love. Enjoy them for what they are, not what some collector book hypothesizes that they're worth. A '55 thru '05 are all going to run in a similar manner; the enjoyment and sensation don't care where or when they come from. These machines embody a moment of brilliant, pragmatic engineering by folks that rode motorcycles themselves. Easy to maintain tappet clearances & points, easy flat repair access with the flip-up tail section, a stub-shaft retaining the chain & rear brake so you need deal only with the wheel, drain plugs for all the fluids, an actual oil filter, swing arm rear suspension, oil dampened telescopic forks, magneto or points/coil ignition. With an attentive & mechanically sympathetic owner these old beasts have gone amazing places, and because of the parts availability they're easy to keep running. No practical difference between running a 1955 machine or a 2005 model, you'll feel at home on either.