My friend and riding buddy, Steve, and I just finished rebuilding a 1973 Honda CL350K5 (the last model in the CL350 line,) which is exactly like my first bike. We each had time for a ride around the block before the snow returned to Kansas last Friday.
I purchased a 1973 CL350K5 late 1974. The new CL360 was out, but the local Honda dealer had purchased a number of leftover CL350s, and offered them at a considerable savings over the then current 1975 model. I paid $625 dollars for a red and white CL (they were available in red and white or blue and white; the dealer kept one of each set up on the sales floor.) I rode the bike a couple of years, and sold it to my younger brother when I moved up to a Kawasaki KZ650 in 1978. The little Honda finally disappeared a few years later, somewhere in New Hampshire.
I'd wanted a copy of my first bike for quite some time, and in 2006 I bought bike #1 on Ebay, traveling to Nebraska to pick it up. It wasn't quite complete, but looked to be in pretty decent shape as the basis for a restoration. Later that year I was talking about the bike with another rider who told me that he had a similar bike I could have for free if I'd pick it up. Bike #2 didn't have an exhaust or carburetors and was missing a few other parts, but the price was right. At the time my garage was better suited for storage than working on motorcycles, so the two bikes sat for the next eight years.
As time went by, I thought that I would be ahead to find a better example rather than rebuilding what I had, and started watching Ebay again. Late in 2014 I found what looked like a compete bike in good shape on Ebay, and bought bike #3 in Iowa. We now have a properly equipped garage, and winter was coming, so we started on the rebuilding project.
We took it clear down to the frame, cleaned up a bunch of rust (Evaporust is a great product, in addition to the wire brushes we went through,) and primed and painted all the black pieces. We cleaned up the chrome parts as best we could, and replaced some (turn signals, fasteners, etc.) that couldn't be saved. The paint on the tank and sidecovers was pretty good, so it was left in “survivor” condition.
It was good that we started out with three bikes (more like two and three-quarters) as we were able to take the best bits off of each. In some instances we only had one decent part out of the bunch. I was able to get some of the bits that are subject to wear or badly rusted (tires, cables, battery, air filters, various rubber parts, etc.) from Honda or off Ebay. We wound up using parts from all three engines, with our lowest mileage engine (from bike #1) as the base, and cleaned up the best of the two exhaust systems we had. (CL350 exhausts in decent condition are getting hard to find.)
We learned a good deal via trial and error, and found out that sometimes the part you need to reach again requires removing a lot of other stuff. We also found out that the 70's shop manuals weren't nearly as complete as the current ones. Suffice to say we now know more about Honda 350s than we'd planned on. (Steve says he's willing to do one for someone else for $25K, slightly more than we spent on cigars and beer for the project...)
Everything finally went back together, with the help of Honda and Clymer manuals (and some information from the Honda Twins forum.) The finished bike is somewhere between a complete restoration and a good “survivor.” It doesn't look quite as nice as the brand new '73 model that I purchased in '74, but it's pretty good for forty-plus years old. I plan to ride it to our Kansas spring kick-off event, the Roy's BBQ RTE (check the events section of the forum.) In the meantime, here are a few photos of the restoration process:
By the way, the CL350 is a sport touring motorcycle. I rode my first one from Wichita to Padre Island in 1976. This one may make the trip in the back of the pickup next winter. (It's possible that I've become wiser in the intervening thirty-nine years...)
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