Topic: My 1975 CB550F Build

[Dr. Noisewater]

Hey guys, it's time I finally share what I've been working on all summer. This is my first bike build and if it wasn't for this forum I'd still be at square one. Thank you all so much. Anyway..

I bought this bike last fall. It had been sitting in a field for about 20 years and it obviously wasn't running. It pretty much sat over the winter until I moved into a new house with a proper garage. At the beginning of the summer I decided I wanted to have this thing hit the streets before the snow did. Well, today we finally took our maiden voyage. Here's some before/after photos, although there's still a bunch of little things I need to do before it's truly roadworthy.

The first day I brought it home. This was after I'd taken off the matching saddlebags, which you can see sitting in the background.


I ditched the Windjammer..





The first day in the new garage.


Strippin' down


New gauges


New look






Right before the first time out.




Like I said it still needs some fine tuning to be 100%, but I'm pretty happy with the way it's turned out. A lot of people from the forum have helped me in one way or another, but special thanks goes to harisuluv for his phenomenal carb rebuild. One of the bodies had a broken stud inside and he was able to replace the body and put together a seriously beautiful set of carbs. Here's a link for the before & after of the carbs: http://imgur.com/a/ECmjM

[Damage Inc]

Nice work Dr.
I like the style you've chosen. A similar style to what I hope to achieve with my project.
How tall are you? How do you feel with the rearset position? Did you make or buy the rearsets?

[Dr. Noisewater]

Thanks Damage. I'm about 6'1". I bought the rear sets from old school speed. They were about $150 with linkage kit and folding pegs, although I used the linkage kit from Dime City Cycles instead. It took a little trial and error to get the pegs where they felt comfortable, but they feel pretty good now. The bracket I made to mount them wasn't the most substantial so I'll have to make a thicker one over the winter.

Actually.. the rear sets are in a different location depending on which picture you're looking at. The pictures of the "finished" bike in the garage have the pegs mounted in the passenger foot peg location, but on the F model this is way too far back, unless you're going to have an extra long race tank with the seat at the very back. From what I can tell in pics, the passenger foot pegs on the K model aren't quite as far back and might be feasible for mounting rear sets, but I'm not totally sure. If you look closely between the driveway and garage pics you can see the pegs are moved forward about 2" in the driveway pic. I positioned them directly under my butt and it felt pretty good.

[Bankerdanny]

Whose gauges did you use?

[Dr. Noisewater]

They're from Dime City Cycles. They're the 2.5" chrome with black face.

[harisuluv]

Looks great!  Thank you for the honorable mention, was my pleasure!