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Dealer vs. Independent Shop: When to Choose Which?
We love working on your rigs, but sometimes the dealer actually is your best bet. Here’s an honest breakdown of when to come to us and when to utilize your warranty.
Old School Moto Inc is a motorcycle service, repair, restoration, and resale business in Lafayette, Louisiana. We specialize in the carbureted Japanese bikes of the 1980s and ’90s the Hondas, Yamahas, and Suzukis the franchised dealers won’t service anymore. Acadiana is full of these machines and short on shops that still know how to keep them running. We exist to close that gap.
Because the bikes are old school. The methods are old school. The handshake-and-your-word way of doing business is old school. We’re not playing a part this is just how we do it.
Build • Fix • Ride.
Whether you need routine maintenance, major repairs, or performance upgrades, we’re ready to help.
We’re a family. The shop is run by Mac a lifelong rider and self-taught tradesman working through Penn Foster’s accredited Motorcycle Repair Technician program alongside his wife and their three kids, who grow up around the work the way kids used to grow up around their parents’ trade. The business is held in trust for them. We’re not building something to sell next year. We’re building something to hand down.
Beyond the bikes, Old School Moto Inc is a documentation project. South Louisiana is home to master tradesmen many of them in the historically Black and Creole neighborhoods of Lafayette whose mechanical knowledge has never been written down. As they retire, that knowledge goes with them.
We’re building relationships with those craftsmen and preserving what they know through video, oral history, and old-fashioned apprentice-style mentorship. We’re also developing a hands-on workshop program, with outreach to local youth, so the next generation gets a real chance to learn the trade.
The motorcycle work pays the bills and keeps the doors open. The preservation work is why the doors are worth keeping open.
It’s also why we buy non-running bikes. Every tired old machine we bring back is one more bike that keeps running and one more chance to do the work, and pass the knowledge on, the right way
We believe in analog machines and the people who understand them. A carbureted engine doesn’t lie to you it tells you what’s wrong if you know how to listen. That kind of knowledge used to be everywhere. Now it’s getting rare. We think that’s worth doing something about.
So we work the way good shops always worked: tell the customer the truth, charge a fair price, stand behind the job, and never take the shortcut. Authentic. Mechanical. Family. Those three words are the whole standard.
We love working on your rigs, but sometimes the dealer actually is your best bet. Here’s an honest breakdown of when to come to us and when to utilize your warranty.
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