The mighty Six…

The kids have moved out.  Actually, they moved out quite a while ago.   Getting them to take the stuff they left behind…that’s another story.   Susie and I are going through one of the (now) extra bedrooms and making boxes of their stuff for them to take home on the next visit.  Actually, it’s boxes of their stuff that I’ll sneak into their cars on their next visit.

Anyway, while going through the debris and detritus left in the young ‘uns closets I came across some old photos.   A couple caught my eye…one was a close-up of my old CBX Honda’s engine.  You saw that a couple of blogs down.   This next one is another shot of the same CBX.   Those old film cameras that I shot with in those days did a nice job, and the photo brought back memories of one my more memorable motorcycles.

The mighty Six…my old 1982 Honda CBX

I bought the CBX in 1992 (when it was already 10 years old), but the bike only had 4500 miles on it and it was in pristine condition.  The price was $4500, perfectly matching the mileage.  Everything was stock, and everything was in perfect shape (other than the tires, which were cracking with age).

I must have gone back to Bert’s four times drooling over that bike, and when I finally made up my mind to buy it and went back for a fifth time, it was gone.  Sold.  I’d lost my opportunity.  Ah, well, I could bounce around for a while longer on my Harley.

Bert’s was a magnet, though, and lots of times after work I’d stop there just to look at the motorcycles.   The place was like an art gallery to me.   I just liked to look.

So, you can imagine my surprise a month or two later when I stopped in again and the CBX was back on the floor.    The bike had been sold to a Japanese collector, I was told, and the deal fell through.

Opportunity didn’t need to knock twice for me.   I bought it on the spot.

The CBX was an amazing motorcycle. 1050cc. Six cylinders. Six carbs. 24 valves. Double overhead cams. Actually, it was quadruple overhead cams. The cylinder head was so long each cam was split in two, and the two halves were coupled in the middle by what are called Oldham couplers.

The CBX didn’t have much bottom end, but once the engine got going, the thing was amazing. And the sound! Wow! It sounded like a Formula 1 race car. I read somewhere that the Japanese engineers actually spent time on a US aircraft carrier listening to fighter jets take off, and their objective was to make the CBX sound like that. When the conditions were right, I convinced myself I could hear the F-14 in my CBX.

The bike was fun, and it drew the looks wherever I rode it. Honda only made the CBX for 4 years (1979 through 1982). They were expensive to manufacture (it seemed like every fastener was a custom design) and they didn’t sell all that well. But it was an awesome display of technology. I’m a mechanical engineer, and the design spoke to me.

I never had any regrets with that old CBX.  I rode it hard for the next 10 years, and other than dropping it a couple of times in 0-mph mishaps (see the blog below on dropped bikes), it served me well.   I rode it all over and it never missed a beat.   When I first bought it, I could walk into any Honda dealer and buy parts for it (even though it was 10 years old).   10 years later (when the bike was 20 years old), that wasn’t the case any more, and that scared me a bit.   The CBX was years ahead of its time and it was complicated.  I realized that if something on that bike broke and I couldn’t find parts, I’d have a $4500 paperweight.

In those days, I was on a CBX Internet mailing list.   I put a note on the CBX mailing list advising folks that I wanted to sell the bike, and it sold that day.  I got a fair price for it, and the mighty Six was gone.   No regrets, folks…I had lots of fun and it was time to move on.