RISIING SON
How do we attract new, younger riders into classic motorcycling? Morgan Rue suggests that his Honda twin is a good place to start…
Two recurring themes in the old bike press catch the eye: ‘What constitutes a classic?’ and ‘How do we attract new and younger riders into the fold?’ The 1976 Honda CL360 and its present pilot address these questions. Those folk who subscribe to the view that if it’s a Jap then it’s not a classic had best look away now…
The story starts with our small fleet of British, fully paid-up classics, all of which lie outside the purview of an A2 licence. My son Michael, recent recipient of such (and boy, are they harder to get than when I was a lad, etc), wasn’t even looking to replace his supermoped with real iron. However, I saw a way to increase the stable by one, without breaking the ludicrous ‘one in, one out’ rule currently in operation.
On a trip to Oregon I’d seen a Honda CL175, and was impressed by the looks. It’s a CB175 power train and chassis, of course, but the wide bars and sinuous high-level pipes made the CL range look rather serious off-roaders, which they are not. But as a bike for tooling around town, they are the business. And Michael needed one – he just didn’t know it yet…
Research once home indicated that Mr Honda had given the off-road treatment to a range of products, from 125 up to the mighty double-knocker 450 twin, but none was exported to Europe and certainly not to Blighty. The perennial ‘grey porridge’ argument? CLs available in the UK are therefore limited to items scooped up in the US, crammed into ISO-freights and shipped here, to be knocked out as ‘projects’. You know the type: ‘Engine turns over but no attempt has been made to start it’.
For once, I took my own advice and found an example which someone had already restored, albeit not totally standard, but well. It was the 360 variant, equipped with the six-speed gearbox. It looked pretty much in showroom condition and had stainless fasteners wherever safety wasn’t compromised. It still had the factory tool kit in the neat holder under the sidepanel. Unsurprisingly it started on the button (how novel!) and rode superbly, so it was loaded onto our Motolug and dragged back to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to join the fleet.
The only apparent fault was a tendency for the clutch lever to click over-centre when pulled in. Having bought the manual at a Stafford show, it was easy enough to work out that the adjustment is required at both the lever and the gearbox end separately, for the mechanism to work properly. To be on the safe side I replaced the clutch’s rotating ramp with a NOS item from David Silver, who is the go-to guy for all matters vintage Honda. He has a neat Honda museum too.
Spares availability follows the predictable path that mechanical parts (shared with the CB and CJ counterparts) are findable, service parts are no problem, and cycle parts unique to the scrambler are scarce. Lots of US breakers seem to advertise secondhand parts on a well-known auction site. The unique exhausts are now made fully of unobtainium as they rusted out in the day, and that day was many days in the past. Most CLs offered for sale now have welded-up original silencer boxes, which were painted black, or have non-standard silencers fitted. (If you know of a warehouse full of NOS Honda CL exhausts, let me know. We’ll be rich.)
The only other gripe is the mirrors. The stalks are too short to give anything other than a panoramic view of the rider’s elbows, but this is an easy fix for very little money.
The 360 was the last variant made, from 1974 to 76. Honda upgraded to a six-speed gearbox, which was not really necessary, and for some reason switched to CV carbs, despite the Keihins on previous models being bulletproof. No obvious advantage accrued from the swap, and some riders find the CV carbs a little jittery holding a steady speed. The revised motor and carbs gave 34bhp, lower than the 350 predecessor, but torque was spread more equitably.
The bike is remarkably free from little niggles and is easy to live with. It starts instantly on the button and holds the road well, although the rear suspension is softly sprung and gently damped. Once you’re used to it, bouncing gently into a bend comes easily, though it’s no featherbed Norton. The brakes are drums front and rear, with a 2LS affair up front. The front pulls progressively and smoothly, and the rear drum can lock the wheel on such a light bike, if needed in extremis.
The 360 head differs from the smaller engines, in that the cam runs directly in the head, so replacing destroyed bearing surfaces can be tricky and expensive.
As a precaution, we tend to fire the starter with the kill switch on for a few seconds to build up oil pressure before running the motor. A few minutes idling before setting off does no harm either.
Being used to British bikes, the need to rev this little baby doesn’t come naturally to me. Once warm it’ll take all the revs you’d like to give it – all driven by a camchain the size of a christening bracelet; remarkable. On the camchain front, tensioning is from the front of the engine rather than at the little tower behind the block on the smaller engines. Those little towers all too often have a little space where the tensioner bolt’s 10mm head used to live, so take care. The 360 was the subject of a dealer recall for the camchain slipper tensioner, and engines having the upgrade received a little dot stamped near the hyphen of the engine number. Ours does not!
Performance-wise, I’d say it’d give my old Triumph Adventurer 500 a hard time, although I expect a well-sorted Triumph Daytona might be its match on back roads and in town. But for us, extracting the last dregs of the 34bhp is not really what it’s about. I ride it to work whenever possible, and use it as the grocery-getter in summer at least. It’s very nimble in traffic, outaccelerates all but the exotic saloon cars, and best of all, it makes me smile. The CL is a perfect antidote to my other daily, a H-D Dyna. Each bike makes me appreciate the other.