After years of "working" on this thing. I am finally making some actual progress on this mashup bike that has been sitting in my garage for a couple of years.
Here is the build so far. I bought a 1971 CB500K rolling frame with a clean title that had been sitting in a barn since 1984 on Ebay for $71. As soon as I was able to get it back to my house, without any plan, I immediately started stripping the frame down (bad idea), but I was excited for a project and had never gotten this deep with motorcycles before.
After mistakenly stripping the frame of everything and tossing it all in a box. I started working on cleaning up the frame and grinding off the bits I knew I wouldn't need for my purposes. Then it sat, and sat, and sat some more for about a year in my garage collecting dust. I was still missing an engine and pretty much all the components to get the damn thing to be a motorcycle and not something I sat on and scooted around on in the yard pretending. I was getting discouraged and really struggled with if I should just call it quits or press on.
About a year goes by and while on a work trip, I visited a vintage motorcycle museum, and it renewed my interest in my project. So much so that the following week I found an untitled rolling 1976/1977 CB550 frame with an engine! Woohoo! It wasn't pretty, but it turned freely and was only 500 bucks. On the drive back I was imagining all the possibilities with this gem that I had in the back of my truck. The next day (learning from my mistakes), I carefully stripped the new frame down and transplanted the engine into the CB500K frame. Then life started getting a bit busier and it ended on the back burner in my garage again.
Towards the end of 2024 (almost 2.5 years from the first frame purchase), I just thought “ok, it’s time to get it done or sell it”. So, I then spent a couple weeks just scouring forums, parts diagrams, and so forth to figure out what I was missing. Turns out, I was missing a lot more than I expected, but this time I wasn’t going to let myself get into a hole where it just sits indefinitely again. I ordered a motogadget and the accoutrements since I had nothing of the original wiring harness and it was arguably cheaper and allowed me some more options for customization in the future. Also ended up with a 2001 Yamaha R6 front end assembly, for the more aggressive scrambler style I was looking for. Probably spent most of my free time across various parts sites for the following month or two getting odds and ends together that were a bit harder to find or needed to custom machine due to unavailability (the joys of 50+ year old machines).
Now that I have pretty much all of the parts outside of some minor things, I really want to finish this thing and get it wrapped up finally. But of course, life likes to throw a curveball, and I might need to move across the country here soon and may need to put this thing on the back burner in storage for a year or so while we get settled in. I’m working on it little by little on the weekends to at least get it to the point where I can get it into the back of my truck in one piece, lofty goals would be running under its own power by the end of October 2025.
Side note, will be posting some spare parts ( original front end, spare untitled frame with frame hoop welded, and a set of original carbs that need a refresh) that I have sitting in my garage I need to get rid of.
I’ll be posting progress as I continue, and thank you all for the wealth of information.
