Vintage cycling, anyone?

This is the point where everyone born twenty to fifty years before the seventies says, what? Vintage? What does that make me? I took a couple shots of my latest motorcycle today for reasons that will remain obscure, but I liked the pictures, so I thought I'd put a couple up. For the record, it's a 1972 Honda CB350 twin, the best-selling bike in America. Well, not the '72, but the CB350 in general, which only sold from '68 or so through somewhere around '75. Vintage racing outfits all over the states have picked up most of these old bikes, although one old guy I know here in Fremont County has about 1,000 of these sitting in tractor trailers on some property outside the small town of Florence.

My neighbor had this bike sitting behind his shed for at least six years. I kept seeing it every time I went outside and kept thinking to myself, I wonder if I could get that bike to run? Happily, the answer was yes. After stripping it down to basically the frame and the engine (mostly for some deep cleaning), I managed to get it put back together with only a small handful of misc. parts left over. Changed the oil, greases, spark plugs, new battery, tore the carbs completely down to deep clean them and put them back together again with new gaskets and fuel lines, added a few newish parts (used parts in decent shape from ebay), did lots and lots of cleaning and polishing getting all the caked on grease and rust off, and that was about it. Put it all back together and hope it runs, which it does, wonderfully. It still needs a paint job and a new headlight bucket, but we can't have everything at once. Mostly we're figuring out that I just like to tinker with things.