78 Goldwing Cafe Racer

I had been without a bike for a couple of years and was missing it really badly. My buddy Justin called and said he had just bought a bike for $800 and it was going to be awesome. Not to be outdone, I promptly got on Craigslist and started shopping. This is what I came up with.

Guy wanted $750 for a 1978 Honda Goldwing (GL1000). I went to check out the bike, and it turned out that it ran pretty well for having sat for 2 years. We settled on $700 and I came back with a trailer (it needed a new rear inner tube). I had the basis for my cafe project. Here are some more pictures after I dropped it off at Gene's Gallery, a touring motorcycle specialty store (particularly for Goldwings) that happened to be located just a few miles from home. They changed the oil, got me a new rear tube, and took care of the state inspection so I could get on the road.

That mirror there says "Big and bulbous, just like the bike!" A previous owner apparently had a sense of humor. So I set about making it closer to what I wanted. It's a big bike, almost 700 lbs, and felt like it. The first thing to go was the windshield. It was a universal-fit jobby that just clamped on the bars. The bars had to be replaced as well. I picked up a set of clubman bars with bar-end mirrors and grips from Amazon and anxiously awaited a clear day I could get them on. It took me less than an hour to get them swapped, and I was ready to ride.

Yes, I did lose some steering angle. Yes, I'm okay with that. Also, yes I kept the original cables and I'm okay with them sticking out like they do. It makes the clutch a bit heavier, but it's perfectly functional and if/when I sell it they can put it back like it was.

I rode it like that for a year, and this year put a New 2 U Kit in it, as suggested by everyone I spoke to. Basically when you buy a Goldwing, you change the timing belts. Period. Doesn't matter if the previous owner says he just did. If the timing is off, the valves will hit the pistons and your engine will be a boat anchor. The kit comes with the timing belts, spark plugs, thermostat, t-stat gasket, and new radiator hoses. When I did the New 2 U kit, I also did a valve adjustment and replaced a faulty starter solenoid that had been plaguing me for a while. 

The thing ran better than it ever had, and we ran it all over. Everywhere I took it, I got 2 responses

1. "Holy shit, that's a cool Goldwing!" and
2. "Holy shit that's a cool bike! What is it!?"

Hindsight is always 20/20 and typing this up made me realize I never should have gotten rid of it. I traded it for a boat with the thought of having something the whole family could enjoy. Guess I kinda missed the whole point of having a motorcycle to begin with....

Update July 2014: She's mine again!

I'd been casually browsing Craigslist and saw the guy had I'd sold it to had it up for sale. So, after scrounging for some extra cash I went and bought it back. I was glad to have her back, but she'd seen better days. 

He had given it a shitty paint job and dropped it "in the garage" a couple of times. He'd added crash bars and accumulated more than a full set of Vetter fairings and bags with the brackets "because the guy would only sell the whole set." Of course he didn't want it taking up space in his garage so it came home with me too. Tried to sell the , but no one appeared to want them so I just pitched them. The speedometer had ceased to work. In one of the drops, the gauges had gotten busted up so he had attached a set from a Yamaha XS. He'd tried to recover the seat only to decide the original cover was adequate, so he tried to glue it back in place but it's crooked. 

The flanges that interact with the wheel hub in the speedometer pickup had bent out of place, leading to the speedometer failure. That was easy enough to fix once I figured out what caused it. While I had the wheel off, I put the left-side front brake rotor back on and started to shop for the caliper and brake line I'd need to finish the brake setup. The crash bars came off. The clubmans went back on. And away I rode.

And then I ran into some electrical issues. When riding up to a 4-way stop, the bike just lost all its electrics and died. No lights, no starter, no nothing. It was a Saturday night downtown, so I pushed the bike off to the side as traffic tried to move around me and went to work trying to find the gremlin. I thought maybe it had blown a main fuse, but the previous owner had removed the main fuse, replacing it with a straight piece of wire. After some pushing it out of traffic and doing some more digging (and sending a nasty email to him to try to figure out why the hell he'd remove the main fuse) I discovered that the plug to the ignition switch had come loose. Pushing it back on gave me power back, and I zip-tied it and rode home to find a solution. I ended up removing the plug entirely, and with the help of my trusty wiring diagram I wired in a toggle switch inside the false tank box. Until I got the wiring fixed, we took to calling her "Old Blue Balls." You really want to ride her, but she doesn't always let you.

I was sure an oil change was due, so I gathered the appropriate supplies and a spin-on filter adapter. I flushed the radiator and changed the rear differential oil (it looked like probably hadn't been changed in the bike's 35k miles. I bought a cab sync tool and sync'd the carburetors, adjusted the valves, and adjusted the ignition timing. Runs better than it ever has for me.

The gauges were next to go. I took off the XS gauges and made a bracket to hold just the original speedometer with a couple of LED idiot lights for Neutral and oil pressure. Put LED bulbs in all the gauges.

Update: Winter 2014/15 - Paint

Decided the shitty blue paint job had to go. I bought off ebay the right-side body panel that had been missing. It was cracked so repaired it and used body filler to smooth out the crack on the front. I wanted to go with a creamy white with red and blue stripes, but decided for the time being to go black. After many, many hours of body filler, priming, and sanding I ended up with a decent rattle-can job. It's not as glossy as I'd like, but after I decide whether or not to do a pattern on the side panels I'll shoot a clear coat over it. I picked up some new badges for the sides of the false tank that I'll put on when it's all said and done, probably sometime this spring. 

Next is to get the seat recovered in brown leather with matching brown leather grips. I'm planning to use perforated bicycle grip tape. Once I get that done I can figure out how I'm going to attach an LED strip light to the tail and ditch the rear fender/light setup.  I want to find a GSXR for setup and do a fork swap to beef up the front end a bit, but that'll be down the road. Once I get the seat and grips sorted out, I'll likely spring for the Dyna S electronic ignition and Randakk's carb rebuilt kit. We will see what the future brings.