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.

Honda CT70

Baby mama's boss grew up riding an old Honda CT70. He found a couple that someone wanted to sell, and he wanted his kids to know the joy he knew growing up riding dirt bikes. So he picked them up and asked me to fix them. They were in pretty rough shape when he dropped them off.

So I started to tear them down to see exactly what I was working with. One was a 72 with a 3-spd "automatic" and the other was a 73 with a traditional clutched 3-speed (or 4-spd? I forget). Both motors were locked up, but I was able to free the automatic (which was good because that was the one he really wanted for his kids to learn on). The body from the other one was in better condition, so I decided to keep it. I ordered a 88cc piston/cylinder kit since the cylinder was pretty wrecked up.

By the way, all the parts I ordered were from CHP Motorsports. They were super helpful in both diagnosing my problems and helping me find the appropriate parts.

Years of caked-on dirt and grease made everything hard to deal with, and the head was almost locked up from the carbon build up, but after much scrubbing I was able to get the engine torn down (well, Jeff had started to, so I had to figure out where everything went, get it back together to get a baseline, and then start to tear it down). 

I made some supports for the bikes out of 2x4's and leftover OSB, and got to work. Many a late night I spent cussing Honda for their play-doh fasteners. Once I got it torn down I set about putting the piston kit on. Word to the wise: If you have a question, someone else has too, and there's an answer online. Google and patience are you friends. 

Yes, that is a space heater blowing on my engine. Metal sucks the heat out of your hands in February. Now I just had to get it all back together. It's pretty basic, and if you've made it this far, you have the capability, so I won't go into details. you will fight with the wiring and gas lines trying to get the engine back in the frame. And you will have to drop the engine multiple times to unhook and reattach various things. As you can see in one of the pictures above, I used a jack to lift the engine and save my back a bit. At some point I thought it was a good idea to put the bike up on my bench to work on it at eye level. I think it was to mess with the engine electrics. I was having trouble with spark. Still not entirely sure how I got it up there myself (I'm 5'9", 140lb). 

Once I got it all back together, I was having trouble with spark. I appeared to be getting 5-6 small sparks per engine revolution. This is obviously not compatible with the 4-stroke cycle. I had never seen anything like it, and no one seemed to want to respond to my queries on a couple of online forums, so I emailed the guys over at CHP again. They were helpful in chasing down my troubles. I ordered a stator assembly kit, coil, and spark plug boot. Add that to the battery I picked up, and this thing had an entirely new electrical system. I now had good spark, and continued putting the rest of the pieces together.

The gas tank was rusted completely out, but luckily the other bike had a plastic one that dropped right in. Soon I had a functional bike, and was able to get it to run well enough to learn about the adjustment knobs on the carb. I was going to pick up a new carb, but opted to heavily clean the original, as it was in good shape. There are  carb rebuild kits out there, but I was able to clean mine up with some B12 and carb cleaner spray. 

After teaching my son some new words, we had a runner.

I got it put the rest of the way back together and called Jeff to come pick it up. I threw everything from the other bike back in place or in a box and told him he had a parts bike. If I had more time, patience, and money I could get it back in running order. But I had other projects I wanted to get rolling on.

Here are some links I found useful during my rebuild:

CT Trail Bikes

CT90 engine rebuild

Parts diagram

Re-MX

Repair Manual