The second bike he has technically owned, the first being a modded GSXR600 that he took on partial trade for a car, rode 20 feet, shat himself, and sold. Now he sees all his friends putting around on 80s Hondas and traded a ratty 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee for this 1988 Honda CBR1000F Hurricane, which I proceeded to take a couple pictures of.
We plopped the Jeep on the rollback and headed 90 minutes out of town to the dude’s house. We got there it was foggy and below freezing and the bike would not start. We were undeterred because we had a timestamped video of the bike running though I wanted an opportunity to test out the brakes and make sure it didn’t overheat or anything funny, we shrugged and loaded it up on the rollback. Significant looks were exchanged when the children of the seller, whose store was the previous owner had repainted it, asked why daddy was getting rid of the bike after just putting all that work into painting it? Why, indeed.
We got it back to the shop and hit it with some starter fluid and more juice than the aging battery could produce, which spun the bike over much faster and shot lots of super fun (and loud) flames out of the aftermarket 4-into-1 exhaust as the bike eventually coughed to life. After a few minutes of idling punctuated by shotgun reports from the exhaust we realized that two of the cylinders were stone dead cold. Was it compression? Nope. A compression check revealed all was well. Spark? All four coils were hitting. Finally we figured out that two of the wires were swapped. After this was remedied we turned down the idle that had been bumped up significantly to make the bike run, but still had intermittent start issues. The culprit there was an iffy killswitch which was remedied and the result is a 30 year old 110hp sport touring bike with the comfiest damn seat ever in very healthy shape. Good times. Excited for my buddy to take his riding test and get his M endorsement so we can tear up the streets this summer when I get my CX500 fixed and our mutual friend gets his Ninja 500 put back together.
Photos are light-paint composites with my Sony A6000 and a Super-Takumar 50mm f1.4 lens.