In the fall of 1997 I finally fulfilled a wish that I had had since childhood. I bought a motorcycle.

I didn't know much about bikes when I started looking for one. All I knew was that because I was small of stature and had little riding experience I should try to find something small and light to learn on. Also, the smaller 400cc machines tended to be cheaper and therefore more in the price range that a soon to be married graduate student could afford. Still, nothing that I saw for sale during the summer of '97 was priced within reach, regardless of engine size.

By September, the bike ads had all but dried up, and I had pretty well given up hope. So, you can imagine my suprise when an ad appeared in a low circulation weekend paper:

1983 Honda Nighthawk 450. $800 obo.

Two hours later I was in the owner's garage. He had bought it for his son the previous summer, but since the kid had bought a car he no longer rode it. It was taking up space in his garage and he wanted it gone.

The bike was rough, but I really didn't know any better. In hindsight, if I had known then what I know now about motorcycles I probably would have made a lower offer. But, at the time all I knew was that I could afford it, and that missing tach, dead battery, torn up seat, and rotted out exhaust really didn't mean that much as long as it ran, right? It wasn't all bad, though. He had just put new tires, fork seals, and a chain and sprockets on it, and had the bills to prove it. I offered $700, and the owner quickly came back with $750. I accepted.

This is what it looked like when I bought it.

The plan was to load it in my father-in-law's truck and store it in his garage for the winter. I had no intentions of riding it that year, since it was too late in the season to bother to license it. But, as soon as it was unloaded at his shop Eric boosted it and started ripping up and down the alley, locking the rear wheel and sliding to turn around (Eric is a former Kawasaki H2 owner and grew up riding dirt bikes). He had me talked into buying a new battery and licensing it right away, and it was a good thing too. Thanks to El Nino the fall of '97 was the mildest on record. I rode until the end of November, a month longer than normal for the climate at Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Here I must make a disclaimer. I learned to ride totally on my own. I walked into the licensing office, wrote my learner's exam, and walked out legally capable to ride a motorcycle even though I had no actual riding skills at all. My first two weeks on the road were, shall we say, interesting? I most emphatically advise that new riders take a course and not take the rather stupid risk that I did by doing my learning on the street in traffic. I'm lucky to be alive.

The winter of '97/'98 felt painfully longer than normal, although El Nino kept it warm and mild. By the end of March I had the old Nighthawk back on the road. The problem I was having then, though, was that I became painfully aware of how truly ratty this bike was. The paint was weathered and dull, the seat was torn, the tachometer was missing, the signal light arms were bent and had mismatched lenses, and the mufflers were all rusted out. Both the brake pedal and shift lever were bent and twisted. The front brake made a harsh squealing noise when the lever was squeezed hard. So, I resolved to repair my new toy. After all, how much could it cost? My conversations with the local Honda d(st)ealership went something like this:

"Two hundred dollars for a tach!?!"

"Two hundred dollars *apiece* for mufflers?!!"

I quickly resolved to hunt salvage yards for parts and to use generic jobber parts whenever possible.

The first order of business was to get the front brakes sorted out. Upon removal of the pads from the caliper the problem was obvious: worn out pads. They were replaced along with the brake fluid. The next necessity was the seat. The morning dew would soak into the exposed foam, and I'd end up getting a wet butt whenever I chose to go for a morning ride. That task was performed by a local upholstery shop. They also removed some foam from the edges of the seat, effectively narrowing it and making it easier for me to reach the ground. It was also at this point that I bought a small handlebar mounted windshield made by Hurricane. It worked well to keep the wind blast off my body, but the air coming over the top hit my helmet just above my visor, creating a rather uncomfortable buffeting and noise. I was forced to crouch down slightly when on the highway to get behind it.

The next thing I wanted was to fill that empty hole in the dash where the tachometer belonged. This necessitated a trip to a salvage yard. The local yard was a total wash-out, as were the yards in Regina and Edmonton. Finally on a trip to Calgary in the fall of '98 I found TJ's Cycle, and they had in their possession not one but two 450 Nighthawk tachometers! Hurray!! Happy, I bought the better of the two. Upon arriving home I installed it along with a new rubber mount and cable.

A month later the weather was getting too cold for riding, so with the help of Eric I resolved to tear into the exhaust system and replace those rotten mufflers. When at the salvage yards looking for the tach, I was also watching for mufflers. I had found nothing that was in decent shaper so I chose to try a new aftermarket source. After checking out the generic brands carried by other shops and not liking what I saw, I returned to Honda to see what they offered. The problem with most of the generic mufflers was that they were too long. The 450 Nighthawk stockers are 17" long, and most I was seeing were in the 22" - 24" range. I was worried that they would be in the way of the rear axle bolts and make chain adjustments difficult. After much searching through the aftermarket catalog at Honda I found a sort of reverse cone style muffler that was only 18" long, made by a company called "Lu Hao". They were also significantly cheaper than buying OEM mufflers. Here they are, as installed on the bike: Photo deleted due to bandwidth constraints. Email Brent if you want to see it.

So, with the new mufflers in hand we began dismantling the old ones. If you examine the old picture of the bike above, you'll notice that the mufflers were especially rusted near the front. By then, I had wrapped the left side one with muffler tape and the right side had come to me with a piece of tin already wrapped around it and hose-clamped into place. After undoing the mounts and clamps that held the right side muffler on the bike and in the exhaust crossover I tried to pull the muffler out. It broke off just before the crossover. The left side was worse. The crossover mount broke off of the main piece and stayed attached to the muffler. Here's a shot of the mufflers after being fully separated from the crossover pieces: Photo deleted due to bandwidth constraints. Email Brent if you want to see it.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the old exhaust crossover. It was thrown away in disgust before I could get a camera out to the shop. It was totally rusted out, and was beyond repair of even the most expert welder. So, just for fun I phoned Honda to see what a new one was worth:

"Three hundred dollars for the exhaust crossover?!?!"

Oooff. By now, you'd think that I'd learned better. So, another salvage yard run was the order of the day. At the local yard Eric and I actually found several serviceable crossovers that matched, but the best was on a 450 that had lain in some tall grass for who knows how long, and was already fairly stripped. We also got a good brake pedal off this same one, which was installed on mine without incident.

So, we proceeded to install this crossover on my bike after giving it a good cleaning. The appropriate gaskets were bought from Honda, and it was mounted to the header pipes without problems. Unfortunately, when we went to test fit the new mufflers to the crossover mounts, we discovered that the inlets of these jobber mufflers were larger than the inlets of the stock ones. While they would still fit in the mounts, they were too large for the stock gaskets. Honda took them back and gave me a refund. We ended up using the roll of fabric from a muffler repair kit to fashion our own gaskets. This kit came with a pouch of sodium silicate gel that one was supposed to soak the fabric in to heat proof it. So, after cutting the correct amount of fabric, we soaked it in this gel, wrapped it around each muffler inlet, and carefully slide them in place and clamped them in. This was a gooey, sticky job and that gel was very difficult to get off things once it dried. But it worked. You can see some of the white fabric sticking out of the mounts in the above picture of one of the new mufflers. The stock mounting brackets were able to be used at the inside rear of each muffler, although only one of the two bolt holes could be used.

The stock left muffler had a part on it that kept the centerstand lever from contacting the muffler when in the up position. The new muffler didn't have this rubber stop, so the first time that I pushed the bike off of the centerstand I was greeted with a loud metallic "BANG!" as the lever smacked into the muffler. This was not a good thing to let happen, so we fashioned a stop for it. Basically it's a strip of metal bolted to the frame with a rubber end on it: Photo deleted due to bandwidth constraints. Email Brent if you want to see it.

The next few trips to the shop were spent removing, straightening, and re-installing various bent parts. All four signal light stalks needed attention. The headlight mounts for the front ones were bent and had to be straightened. The rear stalks themselves were bent, and were carefully straightened in a vice. The left hand grab rail was twisted too. When we removed it for repair and compared it to the right one, we found them to be subtly different. The right one is of a slightly heavier construction than the left, and the ends that mount over the top of the rear shocks are different. We think that they may be from different bikes - can any other 450 owners out there shed some light on this? We also removed the front wheel so the fender could be removed and straightened.

Photo deleted due to bandwidth constraints. Email Brent if you want to see it.

As you can see, all of the body parts are off of the bike. The next part to this project was paint. As anyone familiar with older bikes knows, the pegs that mount the sidecovers to a bike seem to break easily. The ones that came with the bike had all been glued back on, and the rear peg was missing from both, so I was reluctant to try and repair them. The local salvage yard had none. So, when the opportunity arose to go back to Calgary I went back to TJ's Cycle and found two sidecovers that were in near perfect shape. One cover was intact, and the other had only one broken peg and it was still there in the mount on the wrecked bike.

Eric and I started to do the body work. We had the tank and all the plastic sanded down and ready to be painted, but I really didn't want to put a spray can home paint job on it. Eric checked with a bodyman friend of his who owed him a favor and arranged to have the tank and plastic painted by him. For free. Very cool. The color that I picked was Dupont Triple Spectrum Yellow. Man, is that bright!

Here's a shot of the almost finished project.

Thank you Mike at Premiere Paint and Body in Saskatoon for the great job.

While we were waiting for the paint job to be finished, I decided to raise the forks in the triple clamps by an inch. I've read on the internet that doing this reduces the rake and trail of a bike and quickens the steering. It remains to be seen if this was a good idea. It didn't cost anything and is easily reversed, so it's not a big deal if it isn't. Raising the forks also raised the air tube and fittings that connect them at the top, making the ignition cover no longer fit:

Photo deleted due to bandwidth constraints. Email Brent if you want to see it.

The Hurricane windshield is also visible in this picture. I changed the mounts around so that it would be more slanted and solid. The top is about 4 inches lower than it was last year, and my helmet should be out in undisturbed air while my body is being protected from the wind blast.

A valve adjustment was also done at this time, as was the removal, cleaning, oiling, and re-instalation of the chain. When the weather turned nice in the middle of March, I rolled it outside to start it and take some more pictures. Once the engine was fully warm the camchain tensioner was also adjusted. The new mufflers aren't too quiet or too loud, and the bike seems to idle and revv up ok, but it's too early to say whether or not carburetor adjustments will be needed.

In the last year and a half I've managed to take a bike that was one step from the salvage yard and put it back to nearly new condition for about $1400 Canadian. Given the market for used bikes here in Saskatoon I would have no problem getting that price if I sold it in May (but it isn't for sale!). There are still some things that I want to do. The 450 Nighthawk sidecover stickers still have to be applied. It still needs a new gearshift lever, and I want to remove all those ugly stickers off of the frame and aluminum. Also, I want to somehow polish the aluminum and remove the 15 years of oxidation that's on it (Mother's Mag and Aluminum Polish won't touch it). I think a soft brass circular wire wheel mounted on an angle grinder might do it. Finally, a complete top to bottom cleaning is needed.

At this point in time there is still too much snow and ice on the streets for a test ride to see if all is working right, but if the weather keeps up that'll happen soon enough.

See you on the road! Brent