Passes & Canyons Blog

Yahoo! I got my CB750 Custom back from the shop and had the chance to ride it again. As I mentioned last week, I’d had electrical problems with it all summer, but now it’s fixed.

At least it better be, I paid more than $400 for a new stator and rotor. That’s after having it in once before where they cleaned the contacts and thought that was all that was needed. At this point I’ve paid almost as much in repairs this year as I’d judge the bike to be worth if I were to sell it.

Not that I’m going to sell it. This bike has a ton of sentimental value to me, starting with the fact that it’s the first bike I ever owned. How many people have you heard remark wistfully that they’d sure love to have that first bike back? For me, the answer is “a lot,” and I’m happy to be able to say I still do have that first bike.

And you know, I’ve been everywhere on this bike. That’s us in California there in that picture, and I’ve been all over the west on it. We’ve been together for more than 20 years, and that’s more than I can say even for my wife and me. Lyle Lovett has a line in his song, “Don’t Touch My Hat,” that goes ” . . and we’ve been together through many a woman.” Well that’s the deal here, too.

Of course, keeping a motorcycle running as it gets older gets harder and harder. The dealership I used to take the Honda to eventually fired me as a customer because they don’t want to work on older bikes. So I switched over to Mountain Thunder Motorsports, where Joel specializes in these old guys. I’m wondering how long it’s going to be before my Kawasaki dealer fires me and my 1999 Concours. I’ve already started taking it to Joel for some things.

Our first extremely cold weather hit the day after I picked up the bike, so we’ll see just how much I get to ride it in the near term. Doesn’t matter, though. It’s running good again and I’ll be on it whenever I can. Hopefully for at least another 20 plus years. Dang, maybe someday it will be worth a lot of money, like a lot of 50-year-old bikes of other kinds are now. Then I’ll be riding something classy.

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Tags: Honda CB750 Custom

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 1:20 pm and is filed under motorcycle problems, vintage motorcycles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.