2009 Retrospective: 1966 Honda CB450 Super Sport

The 2009 holidays were a nice chance to re-connect with family, and not just a few asked what I’d been up to this past year. That recurring question got me thinking, and I realized that, although I accomplished less than I would have liked to, I was able to make some important improvements to a few ongoing projects.

For instance I conquered the last of the Honda Black Bomber’s mechanical maladies: an intermittent but lingering shifting fault. The symptom was false neutrals, usually when shifting from first to second. I had thought that it was a problem with the shifting mechanism or the gearbox, but those seemed fine when I took them apart. Finally I noticed that the fault was worst in stop-and-go traffic but was rare when the clutch was cold. This suggested that the clutch plates were hanging up when they got hot instead of disengaging like they should. A close inspection of the clutch basket revealed indentations where the steel driven and driving plates had dug in to the aluminum parts of the clutch basket. The cure involved some very careful grinding to take out the indentations, and then I used a fine-tooth flat file to take out the grinder marks and get the clutch basket parts true again. This repair work seems to have eliminated the problem almost entirely—I still manage to flub up a shift on occasion, but it’s so rare I think it’s likely operator error.

Also the Honda finally got to wear a good set of fenders and side covers for the first time in about 40 years. In September 2007, I bought a rusty set of fenders from a fellow member of a local motorcycle club. I eliminated the rust (by a combination of sandblasting and phosphoric acid treatment) and hammered out the dents in short order, but then they sat for another year and a half. In June 2009, I finally got them painted. At the same time I painted a set of old steel side covers for the Honda. These I had gotten from different sources (right from one state, and left from another) thanks to eBay. Both were terribly rusted and dented, but I welded them up and carefully knocked out the dents. I treated the fenders and side covers with a phosphoric-acid solution to neutralize the rust and keep further corrosion from forming.

I love the look of straightened sheet metal. I wanted to install the parts in bare steel—with hammer marks and all—but I figured that would only be cool until I got caught in the rain. Since I’m lazy and did not want to take them off again to clean and paint them, I went ahead and painted them first before installing them.

The painted fenders are a departure from originality, but I’m not bothered. When introduced in mid 1965, the CB450 was issued with silver-painted fenders. It appears that Honda switched to chrome fenders in late 1966. My bike had chrome fenders when I got it, and I assume they were original, but a prior owner had lopped off the ends—a bob job. Perhaps the idea was to make the bike look less heavy, or custom chopped, or something. Now I’ve back-dated its styling a few months to the silver-painted fenders of 1965-66.

I think the painted fenders and side covers make it look much better than it did. I’ve never been a fan of chromed fenders on any motorcycle—I think chrome looks chintzy because it’s too easy. To my eye paint looks better, and a big part of paint’s good looks is knowledge of the effort involved and care taken. For the same reason I’m not a fan of powder coating motorcycles.

First Rides and the Dangerous Learning Curve

I suspect that, like me, a lot of folks riding motorcycles today did so first on a Honda. I learned to ride on a 1966 Honda Super Hawk—and I still have the bike—but it’s not the first motorbike that I rode. No, my first motorized ride was as a youngster on a Honda Monkey Bike, and I recollect that I had only recently learned to ride two wheels of the manual sort. And before then I had been content with three-wheeled pedal travel only to discover the two-wheeled variety when my older brother, Shawn, crashed into me and my tricycle after he had removed the training wheels from his red Schwinn. We lay in a heap tangled in our ‘cycles with me stunned and Shawn laughing his head off. Shawn still rides a red bike (a 1939 Ariel Red Hunter), but his current machine has mechanicals that are heavier and slightly (just slightly) more advanced than his Schwinn.
It is completely irrelevant that my first two-wheeled voyage happened on Shawn’s red Schwinn and that the event was captured on film. My movie-camera-toting grandparents were in town, and they wanted to film me learning to ride a bike. Since I was too small to reach the ground, Dad agreed to get me started if Mom and the grandparents caught me. I had no previous experience with coaster brakes, nor brakes of any kind. My fate was sealed when I was told that, in order to stay upright, I had to keep pedaling. The home movie shows me wobbling down the sidewalk, picking up speed and getting steadier, riding past the Super-8 camera crew, riding off the curb at the end of the block, crossing the dead-end street, and disappearing into the blackberry bushes on the other side.
It was not too long after this incident that I rode the Monkey Bike. The machine belonged to the eldest child of one of my dad’s co-workers, whom our family went to visit one summer evening. While the grown-ups were in the house, Shawn and I were regaled with speed demonstrations as the Monkey Bike’s owner flogged his steed along the pock-marked dirt driveway, out to the road, and back. These folks lived in the country, so the driveway was long enough to let the Monkey Bike generate all the speed and noise it could.
Shawn was offered and accepted a ride, and, before I knew it, my turn came. I was instructed that to make the machine go I should twist the grip one way, and to make it slow down I should twist it again, or the other way, or more, or the other one, or something. Whatever.
I climbed aboard and the Monkey Bike shot off down the driveway, hitting every pothole, and splashing the mud out of the puddles. I held on for my dear, short life while the rest of me flew out behind like a pennant, occasionally coming down as the Monkey Bike bounded up. I couldn’t see clearly for all the bouncing, but somehow--and this is the strange part--I was able to stop, turn around, and tear back toward the kids, who were doubled over in hysterics. I bore in on them like a dive bomber, trusting that one of them would figure out how to stop this crazy thing before someone got hurt.
The Monkey Bike slowed, and Shawn and the others grabbed me as I went by. I didn’t kill any of the kids, and I didn’t put a Monkey-Bike shaped hole in the garage door. I also didn’t ride another motorbike for about two dozen years.
In 1994, I came across a very dead ’66 Honda Super Hawk. It was stored under some junk that was behind the pinball machine in a shop that I still rent with several friends. We were clearing out the shop one day, and someone decided that we should no longer be storing this forlorn motorcycle for Coast Guard Dave, the old cabinet maker across the street. In a fit of cleanliness, we marched over to Dave’s shop and told him that the bike was going to be wheeled out to the phone pole for the scrap hauler to collect. Coast Guard Dave didn’t seem too bothered. He turned to me and told me I could have it if I got it running. (That still seems like a bizarre offer. What if I tried but failed? Would he take it back and give it to the scrap hauler?) Puzzled, I accepted.
Dave was the second owner of the Super Hawk, but he had known it from new because a close friend was the original owner. In the late 1970s, Dave bought it from his friend thinking it would make a good bike for his wife. Not too long afterwards the engine locked up, and Dave’s wife divorced him. I assume the events were unrelated. By the time Dave had given the seized Honda to me, it was partly disassembled, the speedometer was stove in, as were the chrome panels on the gas tank, and all the chrome was orange with rust.
Over the summer I took it apart, cleaned and repaired it, got the necessary machine work done, and put it back together. The engine had locked when a wrist pin welded itself to a connecting rod (there are no bronze bushes in the small ends of Super Hawk con rods), and this was likely the result of a worn out oil pump.
Once work was underway, Dave told me his opinion of the problem with the Super Hawk. I was expecting stories of electrical faults or poor-quality parts. Instead, the problem was that, up to 60 mph, it would beat his 650 Triumph in a stop-light drag race. For me, this problem was easily cured by simply avoiding Dave’s perspective on the matter. The teardown revealed that Dave's friend had fitted the Honda with high-compression pistons and a smaller drive sprocket off the transmission to make it quick.
By the time the Super Hawk was ready to ride, I was intimately familiar with its mechanicals, but I still had never ridden a proper motorcycle. I climbed on and clumsily operated the controls, trying to mix how to drive a car with how various parts of the motorcycle work.
I was not smooth. Once underway I was as mechanical as the bike. Shifting required all my concentration: roll on throttle, reduce slightly, pull in clutch lever, tip left foot up to change gear, roll on throttle and let out clutch lever. I rode around and around the block. Coast Guard Dave stood in the doorway of his shop and shook his head in disgust. But I was triumphant—the machine worked! Looking out over the flat ‘bars there was just a headlight and the road rushing past. I felt like I was flying! I felt like a kid again.

1966 Honda CB450 Super Sport

When I picked up this machine in 2006, it had not turned a wheel since about 1974. The seller told me that it had been given to his father, who had since passed away. The seller’s late father had been a heating-oil salesman in Bremerton, Washington. He spotted this Honda sheltered under the eaves of a customer’s garage, and when he asked about it the homeowner said he could have it.
Further discussion revealed that the bike was not exactly the homeowner’s property to give away, but the guy who DID own it, the guy who had crashed it in the intersection in front of the garage, the guy who had said he would come back and get it, never did come back, and now the bike had leaned against the garage for most of three years. The homeowner had had enough, so the heating-oil salesman took the CB450 home gratis. The seller remembered that his dad got it running once using the bike’s electric starter hooked up to a car battery, but it had not been ridden since it was dropped in the intersection and left for dead.
The years that this bike spent dormant had been relatively kind to the machine, because both parties had the presence of mind to store it out of the weather. However, whoever it was that walked away from the bike in 1974 had certainly thrashed his money’s worth out of it. On the rear tire, only traces of tread remained on its outer edges. The chain was so worn that it dragged on the swing-arm pivot, and one of the rollers had broken. Consistent with this treatment were the custom touches: lopped-off fenders, tall handle bars, and lots of road rash. This motorcycle had been thrown down the road more than once. Here is a photo of my friend Chris trying it on for size on the day he helped me bring it home.

Getting the engine running involved some disassembly and a lot of checking, adjusting, and cleaning, particularly the carburetors and fuel tank. It was running in a month.

Riding it around the block, I discovered that second gear was shot. It would not stay in gear because the gear-engagement dogs were worn. I bought a spare engine and gearbox assembly from a local wrecking yard (http://www.bikesalvage.com/) and swapped over the necessary transmission parts. Having the crankcase apart provided the opportunity to clean out the old oil sludge and bits of metal.
Finally it was back on the road and running well. I took it to a local race track (Pacific Raceways, Kent, Washington) to watch the vintage motorcycle races (Sounds of the Past racing series). At lunch time they let older bikes ride around the course following former AMA champion Gary Nixon, who was riding a vintage (and borrowed) Triumph triple. So it was that three days after the machine was licensed for the road, I was caning it around a road-race circuit. Foolhardy, yes, but terrific stuff.
Six weeks after that thrill, the CB450 was back where it started--crashed--when an elderly woman turned her Buick left in front of me.
That event put a damper on the rest of the season’s motorcycle riding. The woman’s insurance company was very good about the incident, and even compensated me for my new Arai helmet that got scratched up, but it took most of two months to get the settlement. During that time I had to leave the bike in its as-crashed condition. Once the settlement was reached, it was just a matter of a new headlight, a fork rebuild (with used fork stanchions from Bike Salvage), and a few evenings spent fixing the dented tank and the various bent up levers and foot rests.

The bike is up and running again. I have a good set of fenders and side covers that are ready to paint when the weather gets warmer.