I always love reading posts like that where you can feel the person's excitment. Congrats on freeing your engine. Hope you can avoid a rebuild. 
Thanks, I am super excited to have gotten her to turn over, when your an old geezer like me (52, just turned 52 about 2 days ago) and you grew up wanting a cb750 but were too small having one is way cool. I could barely fit on the cb400four I got in the mid-70s at age 16. This '72 is going to be fun. I did own another '72 but I sold it and man oh man regretted it like the day after.
I GOT THE (cold) COMPRESSION NUMBERS:
#1 is at 130psi
#2 is at 140 psi
#3 is at (bummer) 105psi
#4 is at 130 psi
Now heres my train of thinking on this -- there is leftover lube, the atf and the little bit of fresh motor oil, that I put in the cylinders yesterday and again today.
Yesterday as I mentioned I used my normal-length 6" socket ratchet handle and rotated the crank using the alternator bold (736cc thanks again without your help on the alternator bolt mention on page 2 of this thread I would not be here thanks dude!)
Yesterday and again today I syringe'd an amount of fresh 10w40 into each bore and slowly rotated the motor and you know I did not find or feel or hear any 'ridge of rust.' I'm thinking my prior owner did in fact just park it outside last year and this was not a 'major sticking' situation.
So I rotated the works then hopped up on the kickstarter and kicked it through slowly -- again NO weird noise from the cylinders nor resistance so I kicked her through many times, with paper towel wads in the spark plug holes to block any oil or atf bursts. I only saw a tiny bit of liquid come out the spark plug holes.
I then removed the airbox and carbs for cleaning and inspected the intake rubber manifold boots -- just a little loose stuff nothing major. Since the carb slides are all stuck shut I needed them carbs off to run the compression test. Then I stuffed paper towels in the intakes and blew 60psi air all around the intake manifold region -- coils, upper frame tubes, the works -- like I sais this bike is very dirty and I did not want any stuff fall from the upper frame tubes area into the intake manifolds by mischance during the compression test.
Then I wiped around the 4 spark plug holes with a wadded up paper towel on each one, jammed it down in there and twisted it to clean around the spark plug holes so my compression tester would seat well.
Then on cylinder #1 the first kick on the kicker made the compression gauge jump to almost 70 and I said F YEAH!!!!!!!
I ended up with 130, 140, 105 and 130. You know the thing is this bike has under 5k miles on the motor so not much carbon on the pistons maybe, and of course we would expect a low-mileage motor to be pretty tight but I do feel lucky here, real lucky.
Here's why I think this bike is so dirty. You know how some people will spray a bike with a light oil when they know it will set for awhile? Did you know they used to do that in the Army, really lube down some equipment for storage, I heard they did that to vehicles.
Because it's like someone put an *even* coat of dirt/dust on this bike, all over, a very consistent thickness.
I have not clean it yet but out of curiosity I rubbed off some of the layer of dirt -- incredible it looks like new under there. But there is surface rust in some spots.
