Hey wow, this is the bike that's pictured on cycle chaos wiki. Nice to see it come together and shine. What dedication. As for the finishing, I've always wondered whether Honda used a polish then soda blast approach? Most seem to think that the special finish was accomplished with a rotary brush, after polish of course. But I dunno. One has to wonder how many very highly trained staff they'd need for a process such as this, what with the directionality of the brush strokes. Whereas, the method I envision would be easier for batch processing. What with the tens of thousands of bikes, and the hours it seems to take to get these results, I'd have to say there must have been some type of proprietary blasting medium, perhaps a talc or even tuffa or volcanic ash. You'd think, it would have to be something pretty cheap, and the clean-up would be a given, they'd have to be careful about that anyway, as such using a volcanic ash or tuffa or the like, it wouldn't necessitate any more careful a clean-up than otherwise. If somebody could dig to the bottom of it, you know I think what we need here would be a person who works in some type of forensic microscopy lab, with some kind of back-ground in minerology, well that's the fellow who we'd need to take a look at some original gaskets from off of these parts. It might even be possible to glean something from some NOS parts or NOS packaging. I'm goofing around with putting this finish on OTHER Honda parts, ie DOHC four engine cases, and I figure there's plenty of room for experimentation, what with all of the cheap parts out there. Whatever's on the junk pile, I say why not dick around with it. Gonna see about having some soda blasting done on my own home polished parts, and ask about alternative media. Cause you can be sure as #$%* I'd rather go about a wild goose chase in THAT arena, rather than sitting down with a jeweler's eye-loupe and magnifying glass, maybe a one-hair, sable hair at that, hand made oil painting brush from down at the art supply boutique.....
-S.
