It bothered you that much? I used to build race cars. These cars would often end up as scrap. That was part of the business we were in. Luckily there are a ton of other cars out there waiting to get built up again. As for CB750s, there are a ton of them out there and they fewer of them that survive the more value they hold.
I also grew up in a house hold where modified motorcycles were the norm. My father was a machinist at Kosman for several years. Everything he worked on was not stock when it left the shop. I look at the 350-750 Hondas and see so much room for improvement. There are so many modern applications that can help these bikes (i.e. Suspension, Brakes, wheels, engine performance). Half the fun of working on my 350F is thinking of ways to make it more like a modern bike, but still look like a bike of yester-year.
The again growing up in the 80s and 90s if someone were to drive a fully restored Fiero off a cliff, I would applaud the effort.
I think this is a perfect example of how some are missing the point of this post. Stock car modifications and mods on bikes while growing up aren't typically done
with low-mileage thirty-five year old vehicles in near-perfect original stock condition! The odds against a motorcycle surviving that amount of time in that state are pretty high; most have not. Sure, there are still others out there, but for how long? Seen any Model T Fords lately with only 11,000 original miles on it? In pristine condition? When will the last stock '750 be turned into a racer?
And, for one particular bike to have survived so well for so many years, someone had to have been real kind to it. To spend that much effort meticulously caring for that bike, the owner must have been pretty proud of it, and you have to respect them for that; watching it being hacked into pieces would be like getting a slap in the face.
I'm currently restoring a '74 Cb550 to stock, but I'm not fooling myself that it will ever be as valuable as an unrestored original in good condition, no matter how pretty I make mine look; that's the difference between the maker's hand and a poser. Watch the auto auctions like Mecum's where unrestored cars are going for hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to considerably less for the restored and resto-mods; or even Antiques Roadshow, for that matter. While I'll admit there's a big difference between a cherry '68 Shelby GT and a '76 Honda 750, the mantra still rings pretty clear: if it is at least a generation old and in good original condition,
don't farg it up! Especially if it's a relatively expendable item like a motorcycle or car that ages quickly just from normal use.
One thing I've noticed getting older is that I've become more appreciative of history, both my own and that of the world at large, and maybe that's part of it, too. The more things change, the more high-tech things become, the easier it is to remember times that were a little less complicated and perhaps easier for some of us to comprehend. Motorcycles like the CB750 certainly are a prime example of how things were put together in those days, and the stock bikes become a little time machine that freezes that moment in history. Screw with it and the history is gone. Screw with them all, and nobody will ever know how to do it right. Hell, the Wright Brother's Flyer in the Smithsonian isn't even precisely correct; when time came to restore the plane, even the Wrights weren't sure how it should go together (as they had made so many modifications to it), so it's a hodgepodge of several different machines...
Sorry about the rant. By the time this particular bike was posted, major destruction had already commenced, so all that was left was to try to encourage making the most out of the mess. The bike certainly deserves that, at the very least. And it may be that some fellow forum member will get some real nice parts for their project, so all is not lost.
I've got nothing against cafes or bobbers; I've seem some truly breathtaking builds by some very talented folks. But the stockers are going fast, and when the last frame is cut, that'll be it.
