This winter i decided to dive in and rebuild by cb500. It has about 40k+ miles, bad compression, leaky head gasket, all the fun stuff.
I'm a software engineer - so working on a physical thing like a bike isn't necessarily my strongest suit. But i was up for the challenge - and excited to stare at something other than a computer screen.
I started by putting together this sad little backyard tent and got to work…
My thought was to start with electronics, then move to new tires & brakes, then engine work.
Here's a couple of photo's after i tore off the headlight and gauges:
I wanted this build to have more of a scrambler look - I was a really big fan of the Jack Pine triumph builds from a few years ago. I went ahead and got new handle bars that look like this:
When it made sense I repainted parts of the frame and tried my best at "restoring" little trim pieces like this light cluster:
I orderd a shallow headlight from dime city and a couple of new guages which were all pretty straightforward in reinstalling:
I also ordered a new master cylinder and braided cable line form 4into1 (which is awesome, bc it's a local bay area company and shipping is super fast).
The next big project was throwing on some knobby tires. My goodness there are so many options. I eventually went with Shinko 804 / 805 Big Block Adventure Touring Tires and was pretty happy with how they looked. (I took my old tires down to the local bike shop and they quickly swapped the tires and rebalanced them for me (also for christmas my Dad got me a fireproof tarp that I laid down over some plywood in my tent garage haha - made it feel a little more legit and harder to lose things when i dropped them).
I also finally tracked down this male to male goodridge adapter for the front brake calipers. THIS THING WAS SO ANNOYING TO FIND. It's back ordered everywhere (be sure to get the 10mm x 1.25 not 10mm x1.00). This allowed me to finish hooking up the front brake.
The next big project was the battery / rectifier electrical work - i liked the look of having no battery box / circuit board. I got a grinder and grinded the frame down (and carefully repainted it in place) and ordered a cb500 electronics tray from cognito moto. I was super happy how it turned out - and also a little surprised that everything just "worked" when i hooked it back up.
One thing you can't quite tell here is i had to cut a hole in the front of the cognito tray in order to pass some wires through the front of the box. I did this after reading about everyone struggling to extend the cable that connects the starter to the battery. It was a super tight fit, but worked! I also had to make a new custom battery cable for the ground. I used 6awg wire from wirebarn (per a recommendation I saw on this forum) and was able to track down some ring terminals on ebay.
Another thing to note - while i had the front wheel off, I took the front forks off as well. I spent about 4 hours with a polishing kit trying to buff them out and make them look shinnier. I was pretty happy with how it turned out but it was incredibly time consuming. I also played around with a couple of different headlight attachments, but ultimately decided to just paint the chrome headlight holders black (you can see this in the above pictures).
I also got a new pair of rear springs from dime city cycles that you can see in the above photos. Putting those on were pretty straight forward - i just had to get a local shop to compress the shocks and take that little plastic boot off initially.
ALRIGHT. And now onto the actual engine.
This bit is what I'm most terrified of doing haha. But i started underway earlier this week.
I following along with a video online and have gotten the head off seen below:
The pistons (jugg?) look to have a ton of carbon build up as I suspected - as shown here:
And the valves too:
My hope is to put a new cam with a bigger duration (read that hondaman said this was the #1 thing he'd recommend for improving performance) and hopefully convince mike rieck to go through the heads and hone the pistons. But who knows - still trying to figure this bit out hah.
