Passes & Canyons Blog

My CB750 parked out front of Colorado Moto Service, ready to head home.

I got my 1980 Honda CB750 Custom back from the shop Wednesday and it’s running great. But I’m totally baffled.

I took the bike over to Colorado Moto Service specifically to finally get work done to stop it from smoking like crazy whenever I fire it up. It’s been doing this for years and lately had gotten a lot worse. Spend the money and get it fixed!

Well, I took it in and they told me they were not seeing any smoke. How could that be possible? I had all kinds of theories: Maybe the guy would just fire it up and hop on and ride away, thus leaving all that smoke behind him and much more dispersed. I don’t know. But I was determined to start the cold bike myself and then have them watch while it warmed up and started producing blue clouds.

So I told Judy not to leave as soon as she dropped me off–she might be taking me right back home while the bike stayed there. And I didn’t tell them I was coming so they couldn’t “get it ready” for me by warming it up in advance.

The mechanic who worked on it was very nice and totally deferential: “You’ve had this bike a long time and you know it better than anybody . . . ” And I was determined to show him what he should have seen immediately.

I threw my leg over and laid my hand on the engine to make sure it was cold. It was. I set the bike upright, turned the key, pulled the choke, and pressed the starter button. It turned over nicely but didn’t catch and he realized he had the gas turned off. So, gas flow enabled, I pressed the starter again. It turned over and caught. I told him now to wait a moment because the engine had to warm up before it started burning oil out of the cylinders.

And we waited, and I revved it, and it ran nicely . . . and it never did start smoking. Never. I just have no idea what to make of it.

But that’s OK! If this issue somehow mysteriously solved itself now, finally, and I don’t have to pay $1,000 or whatever to have it fixed I’m fine with that. In the meantime, they synced the carburetors and the bike is now running like a champ. Plus, miraculously, while they had it, the ignition switch developed a problem (what better place for that to happen) and they diagnosed that and fixed it. Heaven forbid it had happened to me out on the road.

And I got out of there for less than $600, whereas I was sure I was going to be paying about a grand more by the time they finally found the problem I had taken it in for.

So now there’s just one more hurdle to pass. It’s parked in my garage now but the next time I take it out to ride will it smoke? If it does I have only one theory: they parked it on the side stand and I always put it on the center stand. Is it at all possible that that somehow makes the difference in oil getting somewhere it isn’t supposed to be? If that happens heck, I’ll just start parking it on the side stand. Problem solved.

I’m going to be very curious to see what happens.

Biker Quote for Today

I’d risk the fall just to know how it feels to fly.

All I want is to have my Honda running well and not smoking. Is that too much to ask?

All right, so I took the CB750 in to Colorado Moto Service to have them work on the problem with the oil seeping through the valves into the cylinders, leading to heavy smoking each time I start the bike up. Get this job done finally.

Well, I got a call from them to say they had checked the bike out and . . . there was no smoking when they fired it up. What?

They did say it was very low on oil–which kinda happens when you’re constantly burning it and you neglect to top it off frequently–and maybe that was why it was not seeping into the cylinders. As in, there was no oil there to leak through. Ken you are a bad owner. You are neglecting your motorcycle again. But who knows if that is the reason.

So they added oil and checked it out and said the carbs need to be synced, which I can easily accept, and there is an oil leak from one of the lower engine gaskets. Tell me about that. This bike has leaked from that gasket since the day I bought it. It used to be a lot worse. I would come home from a ride with oil on my pants where it had seeped out and the wind had blown it back onto my pant leg.

I said go ahead and work up an estimate of what these two fixes would cost. I’m very leery of having the gasket done because I know from experience that that can run into serious money.

And one more thing. There seems to be a switch problem. When they tried to shut the bike off it wouldn’t shut off. Again, what? I have never had that kind of issue. And I did have the ignition switch replaced some years ago. I need more info on this issue but if all it takes to get around the issue is to hit the kill switch I’m perfectly capable of hitting the kill switch. Heck, I’ve done it by accident some times.

So what the heck is the deal with it not smoking for them? I can’t count the number of times I’ve been standing there revving the engine to burn out that oil from the cylinders and pumping out huge clouds of blue smoke, hoping none of my neighbors were looking out their windows at me polluting the neighborhood air. I’m going to be very unhappy if I get it back after spending a bunch of money on other things and then it starts smoking again. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Biker Quote for Today

It is the unknown around the corner that turns my wheels.

I don’t normally ride without my jacket and helmet on but in this case it was just a short distance.

I have an appointment to get my 1980 Honda CB750 Custom in to the shop on Tuesday and it’s a good thing. I initially made the appointment to address the smoking that happens every time I start it up but now it seems to have another issue so that’s good timing.

The smoking is a no-brainer. While it sits parked oil seeps past the valves into the cylinders and has to be burned out when the engine is fired up. So on Sunday I wanted to take it for a ride and I started it and let that smoke blow. Then I took off but it didn’t seem to be running right. I went around the bend, down the hill, turned right up a small hill and as I was turning right again it died. Dang! What now?

It turned over and tried to start but just couldn’t. What now?

I rolled it back and turned around and coasted down the hill I had just come up and stopped at the bottom to try to figure things out. Not just “what’s the problem?” but also “how do I get back home up our big hill?” As I was sitting there a woman came along walking her dog and asked if I was out of gas. I said no, it’s some other problem, and she walked on.

Figuring I needed to get home no matter what I started pushing the bike along the level portion I needed to traverse. I figured I’d call Judy and ask her to come with her car and a tow rope I have, so she could then pull me up the hill. I called but just got her voicemail.

As I was pushing it occurred to me that the woman with the dog may have helped solve my problem. Checking my trip meter I saw that I was right at the point where I typically need to go to reserve. That would explain the not running right issue. I flipped to Reserve and tried to start it but by now the battery had been run down from trying so hard before, so I was still going to need to get up the hill to home so I could connect it to the charger.

I got to where there was nothing but uphill left in front of me and on a last hope tried starting it one more time. It started! I normally don’t ride without my helmet and jacket on and they were both off and hanging on the bike at this point but I wasn’t going to waste an opportunity, I left them hanging and jumped on, put it in gear, and roared on up the hill. Yahoo!

OK, so all is good again, right? Well, maybe not. I put the charger on and gave it something more than an hour to put a bit more juice in the battery and then got on to go for the ride that had been cut short before. It ran strongly and I headed immediately for a gas station. By the time I reached the gas station, however, it was clear it was still not actually running right. I didn’t want to risk have it crap out on me again, only much, much further from home, so I just rode on back home and parked it till Tuesday.

Maybe on Tuesday it will be running better. If not, it will just add to the total amount I end up paying the shop. Not wonderful but not the worst thing that could happen.

Biker Quote for Today

Imagine life without motorcycles. Now slap yourself and never do it again.

A Concours at Steele’s. This is the vision I hate to imagine for my Concours.

We all know how many motorcycles die: they get crashed and that’s that. But what about those that don’t get crashed? If they don’t keep going, why not?

I know the answer to that now. It’s all about the Benjamins.

I bought my Kawasaki Concours new in 1999. I have ridden it something over 80,000 miles. In July of last year it overheated going up to the Eisenhower Tunnel and I had to have it hauled home. Then I took it to a shop to have that all put right. But when I got it back it was not all right. Now the throttle refused to back off properly, so I took it back to the shop. It has sat there for three months now not getting worked on.

In the meantime, the last time I went by, planning to take it for a short ride, it had developed an oil leak. After three months of not getting worked on I decided to take the bike to a different shop, so I started calling around. It appears that getting the work done that the bike needs would run me at least $1,000. Meanwhile, I had decided that the time has come to let go of this bike. It has always been a very heavy bike and I am getting older. I can still handle it OK but for how much longer? But it seems doubtful that I could find a buyer willing to pay even $1,000 for it.

The big no-brainer question: why would I pay more than $1,000 for repairs and turn around and sell it for less than $1,000?

One of the places I called about repairs was Steele’s Cycle. Yeah, they could definitely fix it; working on older bikes is their specialty. On the other hand, I could sell it to them either as salvage or, more likely in my opinion, in my hopes, so they could do the repair work and then put it on their used bike floor and sell it. Other than the throttle and the oil leak there’s not a thing wrong with it and it can easily run many, many more miles. And they will give me about $300 to $400 for it, according to Rick, the owner.

So let’s see. Pay more than $1,000 to have it running good again and then sell it for less than that, or sell it as-is with no additional costs and get a few hundred bucks. It’s really sad to say it but I’m planning to have the bike hauled over there–probably on Tuesday–and take whatever they’ll give me for it.

I have loved this bike. This bike has taken me so many places, and I have done so much on this bike. I really hate the idea of abandoning it. Walking away from it after all the good times it brought me. But what am I going to do? Keep pouring money into it? Especially when I’ve already made the decision to move on from it. This will be the first time I have let go of a motorcycle I owned.

And about that. My first ever bike was/is my 1980 Honda CB750 Custom. I still own and ride that bike. And as my first bike I am deeply in love with it. It is in bad need of some work of its own and at some point this year I will pay whatever it costs to get this work done. This is how one bike dies, while another continues to live and continues to run. Sometimes it’s not about the Benjamins.

Biker Quote for Today

100 reasons not to date a biker: 17. We spend more on tires than we spend on you.

It was rides like this one with the RMMRC that put all those miles on my V-Strom in 2023.

I noted down the odometer readings on my vehicles on December 31 once I knew I wasn’t going anywhere else that day. Once again, as has been the case every year for quite a few years, I put a lot more miles on my three motorcycles than I did on my car. In fact, once again, I put more miles on one particular bike than I did on the car.

My mileage on the car was up about 500 miles last year, all the way to 3,062. That compares to 2,506 in 2022. But I put 3,940 miles on the V-Strom, which was 74 miles more than the previous year. That’s the third time the Suzuki has gone more miles than the car.

It used to be that the Concours was the bike that out-distanced the car, often by a heck of a lot. For instance, in 2010 the Concours to Elantra numbers were 10,004 and 5,581. In 2011 they were 6,875 and 3,556. In 2012 they were 9,437 and 5,061. But now apparently I ride the V-Strom more.

In fact, my Concours number was only 1,849 in 2023, compared to 2,354 in 2022. Part of that had to do with it being out of commission after overheating up by the Eisenhower Tunnel coming home from the OFMC trip. It was nearly two months before that bike was rideable again.

I know I’m not going to get big numbers on my CB750 so my target each year is to put at least 1,000 miles on it. Once again I was unsuccessful. I only racked up 672 miles on that bike in 2023, which was down from the 729 miles in 2022. I try to favor that bike for that very reason but I guess I just don’t do it enough. A new year’s resolution I’ll try once again to keep.

Altogether in 2023 I put 6,461 miles on my bikes. This is down a bit from the previous year, when I rode them 6,949. My total mileage on all four vehicles for 2023 was 9,523 compared to 9,455 in 2022. Are most people as consistent as I am?

Biker Quote for Today

Distance is just a number when you ride a bike.

Despite what the guy at the shop told me, Roy thinks the battery is the problem.

After that ride that wasn’t I got home OK but I still needed to figure out why my bike didn’t want to start. I figured–and hoped–it was just the battery.

I removed the seat on the CB750 and pulled the battery and then took it over to Batteries Plus and asked them to test it. I had forgotten it is a gel-pack battery and it had a sticker on it that said “7-18” which I took to be July 2018. So that’s five years, but I would expect a gel-pack might last longer. I googled that question and found that six years is considered typical. Fine, I’m not going to quibble.

At Batteries Plus the guy first did a simple meter test, and that was fine, so he did a load test. When a guy at a battery shop tells you your battery is good you kind of tend to believe him. They’re there to sell batteries and if he tells you he doesn’t need to sell you a battery I’m generally going to believe him. And what he told me was that the battery was fine, though it could stand to be charged.

So that’s good news that I don’t have to buy a new battery but it’s bad news because not I have to figure out what the real problem is. And I am now a skilled mechanic. But I know that Roy knows a lot more about these things than I do so I called him. He said he could come over the next morning and in the meantime I put it on the trickle charger overnight.

Come morning I put the battery back in the bike and hit the starter. It roared to life instantly. OK. Now I’m thinking alternator. We’ll see what Roy thinks after he does some testing.

Roy arrived and we got to it. The battery definitely had a charge, no question about that. But was the alternator feeding it power? The meter said yes it was. Roy had me start it, stop it, let the lights burn while the motor was off–all this stuff, testing this and that.

In the end he arrived at the same place he had been when he got started. Despite what the guy at the shop told me, he believes it is the battery. It might not be all the way dead yet but he figures a five-year-old battery is probably the problem.

Where this leaves me is that I will go on riding the bike with this battery and I’ll be observing. I’ll keep it on the trickle charger but after taking it out I’ll see if it is slower to start, indicating that the battery is draining. And maybe sometime soon it will be bad enough that I’ll pull it again and take it to the shop again and they’ll tell me it needs to be replaced. I don’t know what else to do.

Biker Quote for Today

No plans. No maps. No GPS. No rules. Just ride.

The OFMC gets out of the rain in New Mexico last year.

The RMMRC is leaving in a few days on this New Mexico ride and at last week’s meeting someone asked me which bike I’ll be riding. Gosh, I hadn’t even thought about that. I guess I ought to.

The Honda CB750 was out right away because its tires are too thin and would not be enough for a 1,500-mile trip. That left the Concours and the V-Strom.

I figured what I really ought to do is take both of them out for runs and see which seems to be most ready, or else figure out what each of them might need.

I checked the tires on the V-Strom and the air was good. Check. Tires are good. Check. My top bag has suffered some damage in a couple times dropping the bike but I pulled out a strap that secures it well so no worries there. Check.

How is the oil? I just got the oil changed in my car the day before because I realized I had pretty much forgotten about paying it any attention. And I couldn’t remember the last time I changed the oil in the V.

I checked, which first meant figuring out how. That’s how bad an owner I am. So there’s a sight glass and you’re supposed to hold it level and check the level in the sight glass. Well, I didn’t see anything in the sight glass. I figured it would be good to take it for a ride over to Vickery to get some oil. That way I would also get a chance to see how it’s running.

It ran great. One thing I like about this bike is that it always runs great. I’ve had my troubles periodically with the Concours and the CB but the V-Strom, as they say, is bullet-proof.

I got home, put in some oil, checked the sight glass, put in some more, and it looked fine. So this bike is ready to go. I guess I’ll be riding the V-Strom. But now I really ought to check the air and oil in the Concours, just because they need to be checked. And if I do that before I leave, and I take it for a ride, maybe I’ll change my mind about which bike to ride. After all, the Concours is a really fine highway bike . . .

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker when you hate the fact that you were in front of your computer long enough to read this and not on your scoot.

The obligatory ride photo, down near Daniels Park.

February has been very compliant this year, offering us good riding days right away. Of course I took advantage.

Friday of last week was looking to be the best day so I got out on the Concours. There were plenty of other bikes out, too. People know a good thing when they see it.

Nothing eventful happened on that ride but I did notice that unlike its opposite number and its predecessor, my new left-hand mirror vibrates as if I were on a Harley. That’s never been the case before. Did I just not wrench the nuts down tight enough? Getting to them is way too complicated for me to just go in and see, so I guess I’ll be living with this for the foreseeable future.

It was a beautiful day and Saturday promised to be very nice, too, so I left the other two bikes for Saturday. But Saturday proved to be no way near as nice.

I took off first on the V-Strom. The temperature was about five degrees cooler than the day before but more importantly, there was a breeze, and it was a cold breeze. I immediately turned on the electric vest, which I had worn the day before but never turned on. That helped a lot.

Unlike the day before, there were not a lot of other bikes out; I only saw a couple. I did notice, though, going over Cherry Creek Dam, that there were ice fishermen all over the lake. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen ice fishermen out there before. I guess that is a testament to how much colder this winter has been than recent years past.

I kind of had a longer ride in mind but it wasn’t long before I was getting more than a little chilly. I altered my route and got in a good ride but a shorter one than planned. By the time I got home my hands were seriously cold and all of me was uncomfortable. Fine, I have warmer gear.

After lunch I headed out on the CB750, this time having added long underwear and my riding pants with liner, and my heated gloves. Absolute night and day. I took a much longer ride and could not have been more comfortable.

The other really nice thing, which I didn’t even think about for a while, was that whereas the Honda had seemed to run poorly the last time I rode it, now it ran absolutely beautifully. Not one thing wrong. I have no idea what that business was about last month but I’m quite pleased it didn’t turn out to be something I would have to contend with.

This time I headed west and then turned south down US 85 through Sedalia. Not surprisingly, I saw a lot more bikes out this time. You will never ride down by Sedalia on a decent day and not see lots of bikes, and this day was no exception. I turned north on the Daniels Park Road, stopped and took the obligatory ride photo, and worked my way on home. Now the weather can do its worst, I’ve ridden all three bikes in February.

Biker Quote for Today

I love the sensation of being out in the open air, far away from all the distractions of modern life. I will usually disappear for a couple of hours, and that time on my bike is quite sacred, as it’s when I do all my serious thinking.