The perfect 100 point Restoration of the Legendary

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Part 2: The Search for the right bike

The bike featured in this article is my own 1979 CBX that is a 2 time first place show winner. The bike won Best Classic in the 9^th Squaw Classic Japanese Motorcycle Show at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe, California in July of 2004

And it received a 99 point score and took 1^st Place in "Classic Japanese to 1984 400cc & Over" at the October 2004 Concours D’ Elegance at Del Mar, in Del Mar, California put on by Bator International and sponsored by "Walneck’s Cycle Trader"

Posing for the photo op at Concours D’ Elegance at Del Mar, California Oct. 2004

This bike was by no means a perfect bike when I bought it in 2003. I found it on Cycle Trader.com listed for 4500.00. I figured, for that much money, it must be a pretty nice bike. Having just finished a complete frame off restoration of a 1971 CB750 K1, I was not really looking to do another restoration. So I figured that I would find a bike that was in near mint condition. My first mistake was that I thought the price reflected the condition of the bike. The more it costs, the better it is. This may be true in some cases, but as I found out, not always. This bike happened to be in LA. Being in the San Francisco Bay Area, I decided that I would fly down and ride it back up. I called the guy, and he said that it was the best CBX that he had seen in a long time. He sent me pictures, and they looked great! So I went and got a cashiers check and flew down to LA.

As I first walked up to the bike, I could see from 10 feet away that this bike was far grungier than I was led to believe. I had that sinking feeling and regret that I did not bring cash so that I could at least negotiate the price with him.

I could have just said, take me back to the airport, but I thought, well, lets see how it runs. So I rode the bike a few miles and realized that it was in perfect mechanical condition. Good brakes, it shifted smoothly, sounded wonderful, as always. So I returned back to the seller, handed him the cashiers check and was outta there with a bittersweet feeling. I rode it to a close friend’s house in Orange County (about 40 miles) where we looked over the bike with a fine tooth comb. It was pretty grim. I felt that I paid too much for the bike. Not because it was a bad bike, but because I felt that I was going to have to do a complete cosmetic restoration on the bike. The obvious things that stood out were depressing. You know, minor things like dents at the top of BOTH mufflers that looked like saddle bags had pounded them for years. Or like the whole left side of the gas tank that had been crushed in, as if the bike fell over on to some poor stiffs leg, or the front fender that had a Frankenstein scar running up the first 4" of the top. But according to the seller, "it was the best bike he had seen in years….."

In addition to all of that, the bike had grunge and corrosion everywhere. All the turn signals had hairline cracks and were faded, the wheels were completely corroded and stained, the polished engine cases were corroded badly, and the tires were pretty worn. Luckily, the tail section, seat, and gauges were in nice condition. The clock showed 22000 miles on it. So I figured that was accurate based on the way it ran.

The next morning I took off for San Francisco. It’s about 400 hundred miles, so I was looking forward to getting to know the bike on the way. It was a nice sunny January day and a comfortable 65 degrees. After getting through LA traffic, it was clear sailing up 101 for the rest of the day. When I got to my first stop, I noticed there were 2 oil leaks. One from the valve cover and one from the tach cable were it enters the valve cover. For the rest of the trip, I had to have a rag on my lap, and every 10 miles or so reach down and wipe up the oil puddles on the valve cover so it wouldn’t blow all over the place.

One thing remained the same though, the bike ran beautifully! It was fast, and sounded WONDERFUL! No one should be deprived of that wonderful sound that the stock pipes make on a CBX. Honda went through some pain staking efforts to tune that exhaust for a certain sound, and to this day, it is one of the best sounding bikes ever.

As my trip progressed, I realized that this bike really was nice, but it would need a complete cosmetic restoration. That means that I would have to tear the entire bike down to just the bare engine and frame.

If I had it to do all over again, I would have just removed the engine completely. It would have been a lot easier because I had to lower the engine down a number of times during the restoration anyway, and there is only two more bolts to remove to remove the engine at that point.

The lesson here is this. When you are looking for a bike, decide how much of a restoration do you want to do. Do you want a 100 point bike? Do you want to get a fair bike and just ride the hell out of it? Do want a really well kept original bike that needs nothing but maybe a detail? Or do you want a project?

This article is really aimed at the guy who wants a project.

In my opinion, there are 2 types of projects. One type is that you could get a basket case, or a non running bike that is so far gone, it may as well be a basket case. These bikes are OK, but you really don’t know what you have. So you have to start from scratch. This can be very expensive unless the bike has really nice components like tank, body work, pipes and gauges. If you can get the bike for really cheap, then I think its worth it.

The second type is to do what I did. Buy a good running bike where everything is in relatively good working order and you can ride the bike a little before you start your project. This way, you can tell where the weak points exist and what the strong points are.

There are allot of various levels of condition when you talking about this second type of bike. When looking around at the bikes, you will have some level of idea as to what bike you are looking for. For the purpose of this article though, it is assumed that you want to restore the bike to a 100 point show winner, or at least one that closely represents a showroom condition bike. Keeping that in mind, it really doesn’t matter at what state the bike is in cosmetically because bodywork can be replaced and aluminum can be polished, bead blasted and or painted. In the case of my bike, it ran great, and the frame was in almost mint condition. If you can find a bike like that, it really doesn’t matter about the rest. I mentioned the frame because with all of the factory labels that are riveted on it, it just allot easier if you don’t have to remove them for painting or powder coating of the frame. As you will see in my restoration, I had everything that was black powder coated or painted except the frame. I will go into more detail about that later.

The following part of this article will be a chronological pictorial and commentary on the restoration process that I have developed for myself. Most of the pictures are of my award winning 1979 CBX. There are some pictures of my current project (83 CB1100F)

I have done this because in some cases, the photos are better and more concise. The process is the same no matter what bike you are doing. I will point it out when the 1100F is being used in the photo.

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This Site Was Updated on: Saturday March 29, 2008 07:21 AM

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