Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Thu, 25 Oct 2007

A 35 year old motorcycle (updated with pics)

I rode out to Indianola today, which is on the Olympic Penninsula, not far from the ferry port of Kingston. There, someone had a 1972 Honda CL175 for sale. This is a motorcycle which Honda also called the CB175, when fitted with different handlebars and a different set of exhaust pipes.

The ride out was perfectly miserable. I managed to pick the one day of the week for which rain was both forecasted and ever-so-present. The rain was pounding so hard as I rode up Bainbridge Island toward my destination that I thought to myself, "There's no way to describe this so that anyone actually understands." My faceshield was a glittering starfield any time a car came the opposite direction, which was most of the ride. I spent almost the whole ride trying to keep the car in front of me from getting too far away, so I could tell where the lane was. My gloves had long ago soaked through, and my hands were increasingly cold and numb. Fortunately, the rest of me was pretty comfortable, so it definitely could have been worse.

I got to my destination (I'm so glad I have a good GPS for this kind of thing) without any trouble, aside from the rain. Indianola turned out to be a tiny bedroom community, with a 20 MPH speed limit and few streetlights. Two turns had me parking as Greg (the seller) waved up at me. He was standing next to the bike in a t-shirt, steaming slightly in the pounding rain.

I parked and walked down the hill to meet him. The CL175 stood, glistening with raindrops. Greg introduced himself, and explained that he was very sorry, he hadn't been able to get the bike to start. He felt like this ruined my trip out, although it didn't feel that way to me.

The little bike was very cute, if perhaps showing its age a bit. A 175cc motorcycle, when this was built, was considered a middleweight bike, falling between the 50cc beginner bike (like the Honda Cub) and the 250cc freeway cruiser. The CB175 was meant for around-town use, but would be the functional equivalent of the 650-900cc class now -- around town, but also freeway jaunts as required.

Of course, now, you're lucky to find any model smaller than 600cc, and the 1000cc bike are coming to be the middleweight class (well, in some cases anyway). If you're confused, just take my word that the more cc (cubic centimeters) an engine has, the more powerful it is, generally speaking. By today's standards, a 175cc bike is ridiculously small.

But I digress.

The little bike looked perfectly content sitting there in the pouring rain. The sun had set nearly an hour ago, so I got out my flashlight, and looked it over. It looked much like Jesse's race bike, but with more lights and appurtenances on it. (The primary difference between a race bike and a street bike in this class is whether it has turn signals and a headlight.)

We spent a few more minutes trying to kickstart the little thing. Every once in a while, it would make an encouraging "putt-putt" as the engine tried to fire, but it obviously wasn't going to happen. Finally we gave up, and adjourned to the inside, where it wasn't nearly as rainy.

Greg and I chatted, and I met his wife and young daughter. Their house was delightful, although the ceilings were designed for someone smaller than me. They had a miniscule wood stove going, which kept the whole house very toasty warm -- I'm going to have to look into a wood burning insert or something.

After a few minutes, Greg looked up, and announced that the rain had subsided enough, and that he'd try starting the bike again. The battery was flat, so the electric starter ("Works fine, when the battery's charged!") was out of the question. The rain had indeed ceased, although it sounded like it was still raining, due to all the water dripping off the surrounding trees. More minutes of kicking the little engine over resulted in both of us tiring out, but no life from the motor. Finally, we decided to try bump-starting the bike, which has the advantage of getting the engine turning for a much longer period of time, more like an electric starter. That worked, and Greg did a quick lap of the block to get the engine warmed up.

I got my riding gear back on, and took the bike out myself. The experience was fairly bizarre. The front brake was essentially useless. A full-force squeeze would bring the bike to a very gradual stop, but not on any kind of slope. The little motor pulled surprisingly well, much harder than I would have expected. The headlight switch (which presumably had been built with Off, Low and High positions, but seemed to consist of a gigantic Off position with randomly-placed Low and High positions) was dangerous to touch, lest the light go out and never come back on. The turn signals blinked once, then stayed on solid. I noticed as I took a more spirited run that the engine ran poorly when I'd accidentally left the turnsignal on -- presumably that extra 30W of lighting was enough to draw down the battery so that the ignition didn't quite have enough power.

In addition to all this, the exhaust seemed to have a sizeable leak just before the muffler, so it sounded just about as loud as Jesse's race bike, which has no mufler at all. I was afraid I was angering the residents of every house I passed, but no one came out to yell at me.

Frightening ride completed, I returned, and told Greg that I'd get back to him. I need to consult with Jesse on some of the bike's more glaring faults, mostly the front brake. In race trim, the bike's charging system will be completely disabled, so I'm not too worried about the apparent electrical problem.

Greg told me that he's done a good deal of work (mostly replacing parts) trying to get the engine running properly. He mentioned replacing the coil, points, condenser, and spark plugs. He's also been scouring Ebay, looking for cosmetic parts.

The bike obviously needs some things done before it'd be a safe street or track bike:

It'll more work beyond that to make it a safe street bike (which is my goal before I race-ify it):

There's probably more, but that's what I can think of at the moment.

I'm looking forward to discussing the bike with Jesse. He knows much more about them than I do (although not about street-legal bikes, since all his experience has been with the race-prepped bikes). I'm leaning towards getting it, but I need to figure out how much pain I'm in for with the front brake first. Who knows, by this time next week, I might have yet another way to suck down gas and destroy the planet. Huzzah! (At least these little bikes are supposed to get pretty good gas mileage...)

Update: I've posted the pictures I took last night:


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Posted at 00:15 permanent link category: /motorcycle

Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater