First, the good news!

I decided to give the motorcycle a major tune up and see if I could get her running.  The key came in the mail in early April and a NOS battery came with the motorcycle.  My plan was to clean the tank and carbs, check the points and valve clearances, change the oil and then Bob’s your uncle.  This was the second week of April.  It is now June 4th and I have still not tried to start it.

The tank was pretty easy.  I filled it up with hot water and Oxy Clean, then left it sitting for two weeks while I was on vacation.  There is still a little rust, but most of it is gone.  I will clean it better when I get the dents removed from the tank, but for now it is very functional.

Next step, remove the airbox and rebuild the carbs.

The airbox was an issue as the rubber ear on the right filter cover (left) shredded as I was removing it.  It was soft, but very brittle.    This will need to be either repaired or replaced.































Once I got the left carburetor off (right)  I was shocked and amazed: This was clean...very clean!  So clean that I wondered whether it had been recently been re-done.

I was sold a non-running bike and this was an amazing discovery.  I knew it was not Toronto who had done it because he claimed to have done nothing, so I e-mailed the local guy to say thanks for the great head start.  The response nearly floored me: It was not he who did this, but the guy who sold it to him three years ago.... that guy had it running very strongly and it had merely sat for two and a half years while the guy that I was corresponding with tried to source replacement parts for all of the dented ones.  He told me that if I changed the oil and tried start it, I would probably have good luck.

So, I decided to forego the points, condensors and valves and just change the oil.  If the oil was clean, it would be a go.  The oil was VERY thick and very clean: actually still its original golden colour.  I invited a friend who used to race these old 450's over to help me get it started.  He warned me that I should open the oil spinner:  golden oil was one thing, but the spinner would reveal all.  Since he was not available to come over and start it that weekend, I decided to look into the oil spinner before I added new oil. Again, I found it clean as a whistle.  I noticed metal shavings in it that reminded me of breaking in new rings.  Good feelings were had, but they didn’t last long.

I felt that I had one last thing to do before trying to start it: remove the spinner and get rid of the filings before filling it up with oil.  I bought the special nut remover and pressed back all of the tabs that I could see on the lock washer, and tried to turn it.  The back wheel started spinning despite me holding the brake (something else I will need to fix). I took it off of the center-stand and placed it on the side-stand so that the weight of the bike could assist the brakes.  The wheel still moved.  I tried short, jerky movements and the bike rocked, but the bolt stayed fast..... then the bike fell over on its left side.... and the gear shift punched a hole in the alternator cover, the clutch lever end snapped off and the old Gran Turismo grip punctured at the end.

A very bad end to an otherwise perfect day.

It will be a few weeks before I can post again...

The First Problem

Well, the first real problem is that I was a complete lunatic for agreeing to buy this bike. All’s well that ends well, and this chapter does end well, but there were so many things that could have gone wrong.

My worst case scenario would have been that the bike was stolen, and I would have lost my $1000 when the police carted it off to it’s rightful owner, so I wanted to get it registered to my name as soon as possible. This was easier said than done because the bike came with two bills of sale and no ownership.  One of the bills of sale was dated 4 March, 2017, and reflected my purchase from the previous owner in Toronto (5 hours away). The second was for the purchase of the bike by the guy from Toronto.  Two things struck me: I paid $400 less for the bike than the Toronto owner paid for it six months earlier, and the guy he bought it from lived 45 minutes away from me.  Toronto’s choice to sell at a loss made me nervous, as I wondered what he knew.  (The jury is still out on that one.)  I was happy, however, to discover that this bike was from my area and I hoped that this meant I would have an easier time getting what I needed to register it.

The motorcycle was sold to me in non-running condition and without a key.  Toronto told me that he forgot the key when he picked up the bike in September 2016, and that the previous owner was supposed to send it to him.  Any sane person would have run at this point, but it was only when I was picking it up, having paid for it and driven for five hours, that I discovered this little fact.  I don’t know if it was pride or plain recklessness, but I felt that I could trust this guy: and I was right, this actually was the truth.  When I contacted the former owner, in my area, he confirmed that he could not find the key and had thus not sent it.  He told me he would have another look, and he did find and send it to me three weeks later, but that is for another entry.

The reason that I contacted the local guy was because I needed to trace the ownership in order to get it registered in my name.  He may have had the key, but he did not have the ownership, nor did the guy he bought it from.  He claimed that he knew of at least seven different people who had owned it in the past 20 years and that none of them had ever registered it in either Ontario nor the neighboring province of Quebec.  I purchased an Ontario Used Vehicle Information Package which informed me that the last time this motorcycle was registered in Ontario was 1981.... 36 years ago.

To make a very long story short, I found that the last registered owner died in 2003 and that he had a son who lived in the same town as me.  I had a very nice telephone conversation with the son, who told me that his father purchased this motorcycle so that the two of them could ride together when the son was sixteen years old.  It was already an old bike then, but his father was always into old bikes. He talked a little about his father and the adventures that they had on their motorcycles.  I learned that the family did not have the ownership papers any more, but I felt that I came away from our conversation with something even better.

I had to write an affidavit and jump through several hoops, but as of March 24th, I became the registered owner of a 1968 Honda CL450 in non-road-worthy condition.  Now I can start fixing her up!

AN INTERESTING JOURNEY

When I was just getting back into motorcycling a few years ago, I considered a Triumph Scrambler as my main bike because it is beautiful.  I backed away from the Scrambler because I anticipated doing some road trips and those high pipes promised to get in the way of panniers, but man they speak to me!

I had been thinking about having a second motorcycle so that I had something to work on during the winter and on those long rainy days when riding just isn’t a pleasant entertainment option. I love the Scrambler style, so when a 1968 Honda CL450 Scrambler came to my attention, I acted fast and bought it, despite it being in very rough condition physically and not running.  Once I’m done with the Honda, I hope to return it as close to its original factory condition as I can:

But, of course, it does not look like that, it looks like this:

This is the beginning of the journey!