I too paid $1500 for the same exact color & year sounds runs awesome & previous owner had just new windscreen, brake cables, new exhaust, fluids, he spent an extra $1500 but found out he couldn’t take it with him to new place with him as soon as he posted it I bought it. Nice beast 😊
I have the same bike, dad gave it to me before he passed. Absoulutely love it, really fun bike to just go on a country cruise in, fast enough to go on freeway if you wanna take a long ride too. :)
Absolutely agree. Though honesty compels me to admit it's just as much a PITA to work on as most German bikes too. When it's running it's awesome. If something goes wrong... welcome to the house of pain.
Once we got into it, we found the cowl/windscreen damage too extensive to justify restoration. Although it didn't look bad from the outside, near-everything from the headlight-and-up was cracked, bent & busted and would have needed to be replaced: headlight & bracket, turn signals, mirrors, cowl, windscreen, windscreen motor & brackets, cowl brackets, near-all connectors & wiring, etc. The engine is currently running well after being used to remotor a blown '04 in Lake Tahoe. Other parts have gone to keep many ST1300's on the road too.
True. I should probably alter 'original' to "lightly- and restorably-modified"... I don't really consider pipes and bars to mar the originality. Get into the body work, etc, then yes I agree.
It’s easy enough to put an original seat, handlebars, handlebar trim, and screen on. The exhausts are another matter. I recently bought one that is a 1998 ABS model and I had to look for a long time and at many bikes for sale to find one with good original exhausts and In the end that was an import from Japan. Finding a truly unmolested original is hard, but in my opinion there is something very special about everything being original, even the correct brand and spec of tyres.
Makes me recall how much fun a 250 could be. In many ways it's the most fun size - big enough to have enough power to outrun most traffic, but small, light, managable and cheap to run. It's funny how people get addicted to biking on small bikes, then spend their entire "career" trying to get bigger and bigger machines looking for that level of enjoyment again.
Yeah. My dad hadn't ridden a bike in decades until we took a ride to Gettysburg, him on my little chopped & rat-rodded '79 CM400. He fell in love with it and got the 'bike bug' again... Promptly went home, bought himself a huge Harley 'Dresser' and then wondered why it didn't have the same magic.
ran into a guy i knew one night back in the day. he was on his uncle's 1983 Venture. the guy wouldn't stop going on and on about the bike and repeatedly ripped down the street showing me how fast it was. i thought, "man he is going to destroy that land yacht". then he let me ride it. i took it easy on the bike but i could tell it was much quicker than it looked. i was really impressed and could understand what he meant. it wasn't until a couple years later when i got my first vmax that i understood what was under the hood of the venture. when i watch your video and close my eyes your venture sounds a lot like my old vmax
Picked up an 81 with 91,000 Kms for $80 CAD. Wiring is all chewed up, first bike. Restoration will begin this summer. Cant wait to hear her roar back to life!
Absolutely no idea, unfortunately. We only sell used tires if they're in near-new condition, and this one got recycled because it wasn't. It's probably in someone's mulch or a playground surface by now.
You can see everything we have available at www.recycle.parts/products/search?page=1&q=cb650 The black-and-maroon tank is already sold, but we have carbs and much else.
You mean the bike sounds crappy or "the sound is crappy"? The latter's certainly true, and that makes it really hard to judge the former. We've actually bought a new helmet-cam with much better sound since we shot this over a year ago. FWIW, the guy who bought this engine told us it ran great after he installed it...
LOL... Seriously? It's a 400cc bike that's nearly 40 years old. It was rated for 93.5 MPH when new, but we got nowhere near that. If you mean what's the top speed we hit on the test drive... We usually get 'em up to about 50 on the 'back stretch' of our 'extended around the block' test ride. Fastest I ever rode a 'test ride' bike is split between a '99 ninja and an '05 Vulcan. Took both those out a bit more on the main road and hit about 80. I mean kilometers per hour, of course. 80MPH would be illegal doncha know ;-)
That is exactly why I asked, I was wondering what a 40 year old bike can do for interest sake. My 125cc gets 120km/h if im lucky. Looking to get a 400cc end of year.
I've ridden a 1980 Honda CM400 that was a low-miles, well-maintained, unrestored original on the highway. It was rated about the same power/top speed as this bike when new. 40-ish years on, 75MPH is as fast as I felt comfortable riding it, and it felt pretty close to the max at that speed. As the guys on Top Gear used to say "somehow some of the horses seem to escape from the engine over time..."
Just picked one of these bikes up with low miles only thing I notice is that when I hit bumpy roads feels like parts in back shake do you have same issue?
