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Airhead
I was looking at BSAs and Triumphs before I bought the Matchless.
The way I saw it, Triumphs were up there with Nortons and almost Velocettes in terms of the money they commanded, from my reading they'd reward you with more reliability and obvs, more instagram points.
BSA seemed a lot more budget friendly but still far from cheap and (again from what I read, so not 1st hand experience by any means) it defintely sounded like they were a step down on the quality front. There also seemed to be a lot of totally shagged ones around, much more so than with Triumph etc.
I ended up going with the Matchless because it seemed like they, along with the likes of Ariel, AJS, Greaves, Francis Barnett etc were a bit of a less obvious choice. This meant you got more for your money. Something a bit rarer but still plenty of spares support. It probably helps that for many Matchless models there's a corresponding, virtually identical AJS so while it might seem like my G3 is pretty rare, when you put the G3s together with the model 16s there's actually a fair number of them.
It's also worth remembering that a lot of stuff back then wasn't proprietary or specific to a model or even make but was fitted to just about everything, Amal carbs, Lucas electrics, Doherty levers and so on. So far I've bought a carb, a stop/tail light, a battery, a brake lever, some grips, a fuel tap and a cork washer for the fuel cap and none of them have been specific to my bike.
As other's have said, you're unlikely to lose money. I reckon that spending £60 on a carb for my bike which got it starting and running way better than it was has probably added £500 or so to the value. It still needs the electrics and oil tightness looking at but these are jobs I can tinker away at and shouldn't cost me too much to get sorted.
I got rid of my Enfield years ago because it needed tinkering too often but at that point I needed a reliable bike to take me to work and to college and across the city to my gf's house. I no longer need a motorbike so if it spends a couple weeks out of action waiting on some part to arrive or for me to get around to doping a job on it then so what?