Love the looks, but I'm not a kid anymore and have back issues so not a chance here  

Understandable. My wife rides an '02 Savage and I have a sport bike and an iron head sportster. I'm chopping an '87 Savage right now and the hard tail would be perfect but it costs more than I paid for the bike. I'm not sure if I'll order one or not.

Struts don't look much better than shocks. I want a hard tail but I may wait and do it to the sporty.

That picture says thousands of words... time to start saving for the conversion. Can't stand how my bike looks with the stock frame and visible shocks.

If I may be of help...

Here's an interesting example of "softailing a hardtail"...



This is a 1956 BMW R25 single. Notice the rigid frame and how shocks were "added".

It required a slight modification to the Savage frame, and looks very nice (if it's done properly).

I will consider it myself.  

ya 200 and catrillion is a bit off, but anyway this was the main point of my previous post, the lines are just all wrong.

if you are just replacing the shocks for struts, your swing arm is still way short making the bike look like its had its ass crushed in...
This bike is built for women and short men, so you are either still driving with your knees in your face or you spent nearly as much money on new forward controls than you would have on the hard tail.

doing a proper hard tail solves both problems.

Rix wrote on 01/15/14 at 08:26:09:


Why? Run the rear tire at 25-30 psi and it is fine. But it will still handle better at 35-40 psi. Rigid frames handle better, you can feel when you are pushing the machine beyond is design limits. Shocks and swingarms (not to mention those god awful hydraulic forks) mask handling issues. A rigid frame doesn't give you any side to side chassis oscillation, or in layman's terms, corner wobble, that you get with a swingarm. There is zero inherent play, a set of shocks gives you four points of movement, that compound on each other when the bushings start to wear a bit (because most riders are too lazy/uneducated to lube the pivot points).

I'll take a rigid frame with a springer any day of the week, and twice on the weekends, over a hydraulic fork equipped squishy frame. And I'll take a pickup truck with an I-beam/leaf spring front end over an IFS for the same reason, fewer points of movement that wear and need attention to maintain proper geometry and road feel.

I'm so disgusted with the swingarm frame, hydraulic forks, electronic ignition and electric only start on the Savage that I'm just about ready to load it into the burn pile and wash my hands of it. Yes, my 98 looks 1000x better than a stock version. Yes, it works a lot better than a stock version. It is still a pile of modern poor design thinly disguised as a motorcycle.