Just thought I’d post a line or two about what’s happening with the bikes around here.
1982 Honda Passport
On Saturday May 20th my little Street Cub project from my last post took a best in class award at the 2023 VJMC National Rally. We had a great time at the rally which was held in Eufuala Alabama this year.
A real Dream of mine.
A few months ago I finally got my hands on a nice early Honda Dream. This is a 1962 model CA77 It would actually start but wouldn’t idle or charge a battery. I went ahead and installed a VM22 Mikuni carburetor on it and got it running well. The original ignition switch fell apart so I rewired it with a modem switch and a solid state regulator – rectifier and now it’s extremely reliable. One day I plan to take care of the cosmetics but it’s fun to ride like it is. It’ll never be purely stock again but it will be very nice one day. I’ll tell you more when the time comes.
1983 Honda VF750F Interceptor
At the Fast Lane swap meet during Daytona bike week this year I snagged this ratty old Honda Interceptor to keep my Royal Enfield Interceptor company. It was dirt cheap because it had no title but after a thorough carburetor overhaul and a new fuel pump it ran good enough that it was worth it to go through the “barn find” title process. The paperwork finally came through this week so it’s time to get it safe and ready for the road.
It’s now 2023 almost a decade later, it’s been a hell of a roller-coaster ride. I’m no longer running any business and just want to share my love and knowledge of motorcycles with the world. Coming back to WordPress to stay.
The shop is closed but I’m still restoring my own bikes
After deciding to give up the business, I had decided to switch to a less expensive hosting plan over at Bluehost back in December. After that my blog suffered one outage after another, then last month hackers managed to transfer my domain to another server, After taking almost a month to get my domain back they then wanted me to pay even more money to clean up and restore the site after they let it get transferred without even notifying me.
Enough of the BS I’m just ready to have some fun, are you? Good see you around.
It’s another Fourth of July, and while we’re celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I thought it was a good time to post an update on what’s been going on around here. Things are kind of hectic but I’m finally getting the shop back together and working on old bikes again.
old bikes 1964 Honda CA78
Originally my plan after moving to the new location was to close my shop to the public and concentrate strictly on restoring my stock pile of personal projects that have been gathering dust for some time now.
old bikes Cushman Eagle basket case
At this point I have no plans to offer any more services to the public, I currently have a large backlog of promised restorations that have been delayed so I’m not accepting any new commissions at this time. If I have already agreed to do a motorcycle for you, it will be done and it will be a show winning beauty. Once all of the other peoples motorcycles that are already in the pipeline are done, the plan is to restore the accumulation of cool old bikes that are gathering dust in the corners of my shop and other buildings on the property.
old bikes 1968 Honda CL90
Earlier this year I became very sick and was out of work for 2 months. While this was somewhat of a financial hardship especially after buying a new house and moving, it also led me to the realization that I’m now closer to the end of my life than to the beginning of it. The phrase “I have the rest of my life to finish things,” has become “I only have the rest of my life to finish things.” A sobering reality especially when combined with diminished physical strength and endurance.
Four and one half weeks ago I got approval from the county code inspector to get power connected to the shop so I could have sufficient electrical service to run the equipment and get back to work. As of today (7/4/2022) I’m still waiting on the electric company to come and connect the power. They’re probably waiting on the transformer that will be needed for the installation. Unfortunately all of American industry is designed and set up for a “just in time” delivery and manufacturing model that is no longer viable. We all have to be patient, adapt to our new reality and find away to work around the problem. Once my power is connected I’ll announce it here and open the shop back up.
old bikes 1982 Honda C70 & 1964 Honda ct200
Even though new blog posts have been scarce, (my apologies for that) before moving I was incredibly busy and turned out several very nice projects that Ill share with you in the coming months. Hopefully you’ll enjoy seeing them when I get them posted. In addition to restoring some more of the old bikes, I’ve purchased yet another new motorcycle and will be doing a brutally honest review of it very soon.
Peace, love and hope to everyone out there, the future may seem a bit murky right now but we’ll all get through it somehow and continue to be prosperous and happy.
If you look at a lot of restored vintage bikes, you may
notice that even some very nicely restored bikes have switch gear that looks
okay but you can tell that the switches were not fully refurbished to the same
level as the rest of the bike. I plead guilty to doing this myself because the
switches are full of little tiny springs, detent balls, delicate soldered
connections etc. and if a single piece gets lost or broken your switches are
ruined. Since I am putting so much effort into my current 1972 Honda SL100
project I could not settle for anything less than a full on handlebar switch restoration
to make the whole bike look as new as possible. If something had gone wrong I
was prepared to spend the money on a set of new old stock switches to replace
them.
Before beginning your handlebar switch restoration clean off
your workbench and the floor around it & under it, so that if any of the
tiny parts fall out or go flying you at least have a chance of finding
them. Keep a magnet close by in case you
need it. Also remember that sometimes the old plastic knobs & buttons often
become fragile with age so be careful handling them.
Take a few minutes to study how the wires & switches are
placed & secured in the housing, and then remove the retaining screws &
plates. You should also look at and remember how any tape or sleeves are
applied to the wires in the housing to protect them from chafing.
In the picture below you can see a detent ball sitting on top of the black slider for the headlight controls, there is a spring under this ball that can (and did) send it flying so use caution to be sure you don’t lose any parts.
Once I pulled the e-clip off of it, the engine stop switch
and its wiring could be removed through the top of the housing. Go ahead and
completely remove all of the switches, wiring, & clips from the housings.
If you have any damaged threads or broken screws in the housings now is the time to deal with that. In this case the throttle stop screw was snapped off in the bottom of the housing so I had to drill it out and tap the hole. You’ll notice that there are magnetic rubber vise jaws attached to my vise. These are an absolute necessity for doing this kind of work without damaging your parts.
With your switch housings stripped bare & all repairs made now is the time to clean them up. I use my vapor blasting machine because no other method I know can restore a factory new appearance to old aluminum the way vapor blasting can. If you don’t have access to a vapor blaster you can send your parts to me & I can do it for you. See my vapor blasting page for rates & information.
After everything was repaired & cleaned I painted the stop switch with a little spray paint and used an oil paint marker to paint the red lettering & dots as you can see below. For more information on this technique click this link to see my previous post on emblem & badge refurbishment.
Now that everything is clean & new looking gather up the
supplies & tools you need for reassembly. At the least you’ll need some new
wire sleeves, tape to match the sleeve, JIS screwdriver, a small pick, some
grease, the finest point needlenose pliers that you own, some tweezers, a sharp
knife and a multimeter. Depending on what you are working on you may need more
or less tools than these, for example if you have a broken wire connection a
soldering iron might be needed.
Carefully reinstall all of the parts in reverse of the order
you removed them. Take time to tape & sleeve wires as needed because you
might not be able to after everything is back together. Be sure to watch out
for flying springs etc. during reassembly, it’d be a shame to get this far and
lose a critical part. Work slowly & stay as relaxed as possible when doing
delicate work like this.
The final step of handlebar switch restoration is to test
the function of all of the switches using either the ohmmeter or diode tester
function of your multimeter. If
everything is working great you are ready to reinstall the switch gear to your
motorcycle. If not, it’s a whole lot easier to fix it now than after putting
the bike back together. This is
especially if the wires are going to be inside of the handlebars.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed following along while I completed
my handlebar switch restoration. The next post that I have planned will show
how I measured & drilled the holes in my handlebars for the wiring to pass
through.
I have a dare for you, in fact I double dog dare you. Invite owners of original 1980s vintage Honda RS750s to pull them out of mothballs, remove the damn restrictor plates and race mano-mano against the Indians.
Honda RS750 Flat Tracker
Harley couldn’t beat them without the AMA crippling them. Guess why I’m not an AMA member & never will be. Damn straight I hold a grudge forever. I had actually quit following flat track racing after I realized that I really wasn’t the Harley fan boy that I was pretending to be, and realized just how harshly & unfairly the Honda teams were being treated so I kind of just said, “fuck this bullshit,” and walked away. Apparently I wasn’t the only one because the series ratings tanked and it changed hands a few times, and quite frankly became minor league single brand racing.
Then I think it was in 2010 when I opened up a copy of Cycle World & read that Joe Kopp had won a major flat track race on a Ducati of all things. Digging into the story it turns out the new owners of the series were allowing motorcycles built around street bikes to compete against the ancient but well developed XR750 Harleys. And even better than that the competition was fairly equal, well as equal as it could be with street based motorcycle engines & frames racing against purpose built factory racers. Even Bill Werner the famous Harley racing tuner was running the Monster Energy Kawasaki team tuning a Ninja 650R. Flat track was worth following again! I actually have to give Harley Davidson credit for moving to the Street based XG750 race bikes and retiring the outdated old XR750.
But then along came Indian and now Harley like all of the other manufacturers is stuck using a true production based engine to compete against what is a completely custom built factory racing only machine. For a while I enjoyed their misery but I still have to give them credit for using XG engine.
Now let me stick the cold hard knife of truth deep into the back of the entire motorcycling press and the American Flat Track advertising staff. Everyone of you keep pushing this whole thing as an Indian versus Harley rivalry. Not really. This is an Indian walkover and in the majority of races the first bike behind the Polaris single purpose factory built racer is usually a Kawasaki Ninja 650, with the occasional KTM LC8, Ducati or Yamaha FZ07 taking it’s place.
I realize you guys think playing up this ancient history will help your rating and magazine sales. How’s that working out for you? We watch Fans Choice or read the results on the web or in the magazines. We see the truth. You keep writing headlines like Harley & Indian are running neck & neck when nothing could be further from the truth. All the other bikes are just competing to see who has the fastest production bike based racer behind the Polaris Indian factory race bikes. All of you have lost credibility with us because the race records never match your stories.
A perfect example of this is in Cycle World issue 1 2018. Kevin Cameron interviewed Bill Werner about his time as a flat track tuner & never once mentioned his time tuning the Kawasaki 650 Ninja. No wonder the rag has morphed into a quarterly hipster art rag like Iron and Air. Same for the rest of the once great publications, no loyalty to their fan base and a marketing strategy stuck firmly in 1994.
Here’s a hint for you, the Boomers are checking out and Gen X is taking over. In high school we didn’t drool over Harleys, for us it Interceptors, GSXRs, and Ninjas that we dreamed of. We expected our Jap bike magazines to be Jap bike magazines. We didn’t mind you reporting on the heavy cruisers but leave the serious “Murican Motorsickle” propaganda to publications like American Iron & Easyrider. Also no more headlines about Indian Versus Harley where you don’t even mention the Kawis, KTMs, & Yamahas that usually come in between the two. It just makes you into liars plain & simple.
Here’s my final statement; I’d pay good money to see an old Honda RS750 pulled out of mothballs, the restrictor plates removed, tuned by the best mechanics & ridden by the best riders the Honda Racing Corporation can provide, running a few races just to show the world how it’s really done. I bet you a hundred bucks it would win.
American Flat Track meet the The Mighty RS750
PS Dear American Flat Track, I don’t want you to make the Indians slower, you just need to let the other teams make their bikes faster. Oh yeah the Fans Choice TV broadcasts are terrific. Thank you for them. Please don’t let it get too boring again.
In this post, I look at the much-debated question of which machine is best for a long road trip. It’s probably one for the motoqueros amongst Horca Moto’s readership, but perhaps there is a lesson here for others about life in general….
It is one of motorcycling’s perennial questions: “What is the perfect adventure bike?” Asked and answered from many differing angles, it is a favourite on biker forums, in magazines and no doubt in many a pub and bar around the world. So to celebrate hitting the 40,000km mark on the roads and dirt tracks of South America, I’ve decided to don my flack jacket, raise my head above the parapet and throw my hat into this well-trodden ring.
Firstly, let’s get clear on semantics. ‘Adventure biking’ can mean many things to many people, which can muddy the waters of the discussion. Here, I am talking about ‘overlanding’ –…
It’s now 2023 almost a decade later, it’s been a hell of a roller-coaster ride. I’m no longer running any business and just want to share my love and knowledge of motorcycles with the world. Coming back to WordPress to stay.
These last three years here at wordpress.com have been a blast, and I have loved every minute of it. If you are serious about blogging and are not running any kind of commercial enterprise from your blog there is no better way to get started than with wordpress.com.
Some exciting business opportunities have developed for me, and I now have dealership privileges for Shorai batteries, Rock Oil lubricants, & a few other products and wish to begin selling these products on my website, so I am switching to a different hosting service. You have my solemn promise to continue to bring you interesting and helpful content.
In the future I will focus mainly on motorcycles but still reserve the right to do a little bit of bicycle coverage sometimes. Be sure to bookmark this url and follow me to my new home on the web. It’s gonna be great!
Thanks to everyone for reading along. It is both humbling and inspiring to me. There will be some new adventures & some big changes going in the coming year, and I hope you all enjoy the ride! Now go read the stats if you want too!
Peace Y’all
‘Psyco
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 31,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
It’s hard to believe this blog has been going for over two years now. In the beginning I started doing this just because I wanted to show off a little, and maybe make a few of you happy, or help you if only just for a minute. Never for one second did I dream that I would still be doing this for this long or that tens of thousands of you would be stopping to read the words I write & look at the pictures I take.
The helpful hints and how to articles were just my way of sharing my little tiny bit of knowledge with people whom want to do it themselves but to do it right. Yes, you may look for a few more tutorials in the year ahead, just be patient with me.
The product reviews started out with me just sharing my experiences about items that I had actually purchased. I never dreamed that one day I would be road testing and reviewing new motorcycles & other products. WOW! What rush, now I feel like one of my moto-journalist heroes. Most of my heroes growing up were writers anyway, people like, Twain, Hunter Thompson, Robert A. Heinlein, Kevin Cameron, Ayn Rand, and many others kept me dreaming of what could be throughout my life and I am most grateful for that.
Even more shocking is finding out that a nobody writing a little blog like this could actually make some difference in the world around them. I published a post recently entitled A Low Down Dirty Shame and while it may have been a coincidence but Auburn School Road in Darlington was cleaned up within a couple of weeks. The other road is still a disaster zone, but there is hope.
Another example are the challenges & changes being made to what was a a thoroughly draconian and down right evil animal control ordinance proposed by our local Humane Society . You can find the text of the original proposal at this link here.
The latest proposal can be found here at this link. While still very much overkill and still focusing too much on punishing the law abiding owners and breeder for the sins of those who ignore the existing laws, at least now there is an organized resistance, standing guard ready to fight this. It has not come up for a cosideration in our county council but we will be watching. The Darlington Pet Owners Advocates will be holding their first meeting on Thursday May 2nd at 7:00 pm at The Music Hall, 1945 Harry Byrd Highway in Darlington S.C. Join us if you will.
That’s enough from me for now, This has been a great ride so far & I owe a lot of thanks to my patient & loving wife, my patient & loving God, & to all of you, my dear readers. Just remember, if you don’t try, you’ll never make a difference.
Welcome to the Asylum 