Honda Sl100K2

This little Honda is perhaps the ultimate junker to jewel story that I’ve ever been a character in. When I first brought it home  it didn’t seem that bad, a rolling frame, couple of boxes of parts and an engine that I assumed was stuck from sitting but should’ve been easy to get freed up with a new set of rings. Initially I planned to do a top end job, reassemble it and flip it to someone else as a running restoration project. I still don’t know what the hell happened. Now my quick and easy 1972 Honda SL100K2 flip has become a full on high level restoration that I can never hope to ever sell for enough money to recuperate the dough that I have in it.

It started with the fuel tank which looked really great until I started sanding the paint off of it and discovered that although there was no rust visible rust that I could see through the filler neck, the entire lower rear end of the tank was full of pinholes that took a few hours and a couple of brazing rods to fix. Oh well the stupid gas tank looks okay now and I’ll be putting the paint on it soon.

The engine was another complete nightmare. What I had hoped was a simple case of an old engine stuck from sitting turned out to be a case of one left out in the weather for decades with no sparkplug in the head to keep the water out. To make matters even worse the piston was at exactly top dead center. Finally I turned the entire engine upside down on top of a bucket of Evaporust with the cylinder submerged for about a week before it loosened up enough that I could beat it out of the bore with my big fucking hammer. Thankfully I didn’t bust the connecting rod or ruin the crankshaft in the process.

At this point I was already spending a fortune so the decision was made to keep this motorcycle and turn it into a full on restoration project that looked as good as possible. The engine has a lot of new old stock parts including a new cylinder & piston, valves etc.

Not going full into all details here but this has been one of the most frustrating projects I have ever done. It seems like every other bolt either broke or rounded out & had to be drilled out & replaced. Several replica replacement parts were sourced from overseas that turned out to be such crap that I threw them away and ponied up the cash for real Honda NOS parts. As many original parts as possible have been refurbished and are the subjects of several previous posts here. I’ve even fired up the engine and it runs like a new one.

Last week I put it all together so that I could see what parts and hardware still needed to be ordered. This week I took it back apart so that I can block sand all the sheet metal again and finally get around to spraying the metallic green paint. You’ll see it here first when it’s done.