The Joy of Used Bikes

Or, "Why unqualified people shouldn't do their own repair work."

Let's get this out of the way.  Lots of motorcycle owners do their own repair work.  And many of them do it quite well.  Don't take this as an attack if you're one of those.  If you're anything like whoever did the work on my bike before I got it, you're welcome to take this as an attack.


When I bought my bike, I figured out very fast that the clutch was slipping.  It still ran OK, but it was slipping.  It was already November by the time I got it, so I basically rode it home, registered it, and put it away.  Then I moved in the middle of the winter, and I only really started trying to get it roadworthy a few months ago, just before starting this journal.  For those who can't be bothered to go back and look, the bike is a 1982 CM450C.

I finally started looking at replacing the clutch about a month ago.  After lots of research, parts pricing, and general dithering, I made the decision to hire a professional to do the work.  Why?  Well, because I'm not confident in my skills, and I wanted to know my clutch wasn't going to just fall apart.

I found a nearby shop -- Extreme Motorsport, who moved to Waltham, MA while they were working on my bike -- who have consistently good reviews on Yelp, and decided to give them a try.  Again, let's get this out of the way:  They're not good.  They're friggin' awesome, and if you need work done on an old bike, you should go there.  If you need work done on ANY bike they're willing to work on, you should go there.

So I took the bike over, and told him what I was looking for:  complete clutch rebuild, see if he can figure out what's going on with the front brake, and replace this death-trap of a front wheel (dry rot that got visibly worse between mid-May and late May).  No problem... sourcing parts may be a bit of a challenge, but the work is easy.  Boy does he regret saying that.


I got a call about two weeks later, after the clutch parts finally came in:  one of the former owners, or their mechanic, did some serious damage.  A bolt was installed backwards.  Everything was torqued wrong.  The friction plates had no friction pads on them.  On top of that, the friction disks had been installed out of order, and may in fact have been the wrong disks for the bike.  The steel disks were recoverable but not good.  The springs could be compressed all the way with just finger pressure.  And, worst of all, one of the pins on the pressure plate that supports the springs was cracked all the way around.  Everything else is relatively easy to get -- you just send a small fortune to Honda, and they send you the parts -- but a pressure plate?  Where do you get a pressure plate for an '82 Honda?

Basically, it was sheer luck that the bike was even rideable.  On top of that, one of the two pistons in the brake caliper had basically frozen, which was the source of my braking problems, and the rotor was not in fantastic shape, though it was still usable.

The good news is that I'd picked up a new rotor when I saw it on eBay for $15, on the theory that spare parts are hard to find.  The fantastic news is that my mechanic had a supplier who was able to ship him a barely used clutch assembly -- basket and all -- from a CM450 that had been wrecked with about 2000 miles on it.  So the parts are essentially factory new, and I have my bike back again.

So if you're thinking about doing mechanical work on your bike, and you don't know what you're doing?  Please:  think twice.  Consider that you may be costing somewhere down the line a great deal of time, effort, and money.