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| Day one with a rough CBX. |
A 1979 Honda CBX popped up on a CL ad last month and we jumped in the truck to take a look. I spoke with the owner via phone and asked him the Big Question: "Does it run?"
No, not now. But it WILL run someday, he said.
Marion Minnesota is not an unknown location for me. It is home to Wheels Unlimited, probably the last 'no internet' Ducati dealership in the US. In fact Ducati USA dropped Wheels because the owner/brothers refused on principle to get a computer in order to relay parts orders. It wasn't the brothers who had the CBX, but a neighbor. He'd bought it from the original owner and tried to begin a restoration but was too busy to finish it and his high school kid was salivating over the bike with plans to make the engine into a go-cart powerplant. "He's going to cut the frame up if you don't get out here," the owner said. I almost replied that the CBX doesn't have a true cradle frame to cut but I didn't.
He walked us down in the dark to a second garage. He opened the door and there the CBX lay. Partially dismantled and really quite rough. My first instinct was no thanks and relayed that. I kept repeating the word "no" to the owner.
I looked the bike over closely and aside from the very frightening degree to which it had been ignored or dismantled, there was a lot of good news. 12,800 original miles. Good rubber on the pegs and shifter. It wasn't leaking, the wiring harness was intact, as were the turn signals and license plate frame and mount. The exhaust looked rough but I pushed on it with my finger when looking under the bike and didn't feel any holes or soon to be holes in the six into six exhaust, other than one muffler was rotted away.
We made a deal for a lot less than the asking price and my son John loaded it up--no small feat--and we drove off.
Never buy any vehicle in the dark is one of the rules of private party buying I have drilled into my kids. It wasn't dark when we bought it but the garage was poorly lit. The next day, unloaded and in the snow at the end of my driveway which illuminated everything, the bike looked very bad. It would have been very easy to start pulling parts and putting the on eBay and cutting my losses.
John though, was intrigued about a huge bike made more than twenty years before he had been born. I took Kipp to a basketball game the next day. Later in the day John called and said he was done for the day and had enough of the bike.
"I rolled it into the garage, put the headlight back together, screwed in new spark plugs, reassembled the airbox, put the starter back together and tried to screw the thumb-starter together on the bars. I've had enough," he said.
He'd pushed the 600 lb bike with flat tires through the snow into my small but heated garage, I would have been amazed at that development alone.
"I'd never give a Marine a speeding ticket," the patrolman said when he came back to the truck. "Good luck with that old bike."