1974 Honda CB360 Rebuild Intro

About 18 months ago I acquired a running 1974 Honda CB360T motorcycle. I had visions of cafe racer glory, a la Dime City Cycles, but reality set in when I looked at her in my garage. I don't have the knowledge, skills, or gear to pull off something that involved. So it sat...for a long time. Then I happened across a photo on BikeEXIF (http://www.bikeexif.com/honda-cb360) that completely changed my thought process. Instead of doing a complete custom mod, or a full restoration, I'd do a rebuild, using most of the base bike, but modifying where I felt it was needed, and removing most, if not all, of the extraneous stuff. 

With that in mind, I've finally ginned up the motivation to dive into this project. I tore the bike apart, down to the frame. It was gunky, and dirty, and had lots of rust. I should have weighed it before I started, oh well. I pulled the engine, and the carbs off, and that's where I'm really starting. Last night I finally opened up the carbs, and DAY-UM they were nasty!!

This won't be a simple matter of soaking them in carb cleaner...but fortunately my brother has done this type of thing for quite a while. After a phone call back East, I needed to find an ultrasonic cleaner. So off I went to Harbor Freight over lunch and picked up this:

The carbs look like they'll just fit. As a test run, I tried it out on the float bowls. Here's what they looked like before:

The one on the right doesn't look too bad, but the left...eeesh. 

Here's after two 8 minute cycles in the cleaner, using KrudKutter as the solution:

Much better, aside from the $&@% gasket gunk the PO used, probably because they couldn't be bothered to do 30 seconds of research to find the Common Motor Collective (http://www.common-motor.com) and see that they have a very complete rebuild kit WITH A GASKET!!!  Anyways, after a good clean, all that's left is to scrub off the gasket gunk, and the bowls will be good to go. I'm happy with my Harbor Freight ultrasonic cleaner. Now I have to get the rest of the stuff off the carbs so I can get them nice and clean. 

Stay tuned as we work through the rest of the carbs.

Introduction

I thought about starting a blog for another interest of mine, astrophotography...and then the thought occurred to me about yet another blog about motorcycles...and finally I came to my senses...so this blog is going to be about anything that I'm interested in that is not radio-controlled cars, or model railroads. It could be motorbikes, or astronomy...or science, or...anything. So thanks for checking it out, and stay tuned!