Burned up the engine.

All that white looking stuff is aluminum that has melted into the piston and valves

..and I do mean "burned up"the engine.  The threads in the spark plug hole were damaged and allowed the spark plug to loosen up.  The loose spark plug allowed the motor to run very lean and melted the piston.  This not only ruined the piston but also damaged the cylinder head, valves and exhaust cam beyond repair.

The forks

I started out by rebuilding the forks. I got some new fork boots from my local dealer along with some fork seals since these were leading. In the process of removing the front end I found the fender bracket was busted and would be very difficult to repair. Even if I could repair it, it would have to be re chromed and that makes it cost prohibitive. It will be easier and cheaper to get a new one off eBay.

I did some measuring of the various parts, cleaned up the fork legs and polished the lower fork legs as you can see in the pictures above.

1971 Honda CB450 K4 as purchased

Here is the start of the restoration of my 1970 CB 450. The frame is date 10/70 which would indicate a 1970 model but the VIN equates to a '71 K4 Model. From what I can tell there is little difference between the two years but when I repaint it I will use the Polynesian Blue (K4 Color) since I prefer it over the '70 Blue/Green shade.

This project will go much slower than my previous '68CL350 (which is not done yet) since it needs much more work and I will have to pull the motor to do a ring job at the minimum.

The looks of the clubman bars just didn't set well with me and I like the looks of the euro style bars so I ordered some 'Superbike' bars and installed them tonight. My local dealer also had some NOS handgrips in the back so he gave me a deal on those so I could replace the aftermarket 'Coke Bottle Soft Grips' that were a common aftermarket add-on back in the day.

I had to drill the bars for the locating pins on the switchs and that turned out well. There is a lot of piece meal, non-standard, stuff on this bike (unlike the CL350) so I can see I'll be replacing lots of small bits and pieces. It looks like the switch gear halves are made up from two different sets since they don't match up just right and the colors are just a shade off. The top half of the switch gear has been filed somewhat to allow the wire harness to exit the housing and run along the handlebar instead of running through the clubmans that were installed. I don't know yet if I'll drill the new handlebars and run the wires or just leave them outside and use some nice, wide black plastic strapping (not tie wraps) and strap it to the bars.

Here are the new bars installed and also a picture of the replacement grips.






The tach needle was setting on 11,000 rpm so it was obviously broken. I bought a replacement on eBay and installed it. It seems to work well and by combining the instruments lights from both tachs I was able to come up with a complete set so all the lights now work on both the Tach and Speedometer.

It was suggested that I might be able to pull the old tach apart and fix it by removing the chrome ring that hold the top/bottom halves together. I gave it a try and the damage the chrome ring was mininum. It turns out the return spring on the tach needle was broken. I attempted to glue the two halves back together so I'll have to post the results later.

Here is a picture sequence of the tach. You can see the drop of glue in the last picture that is holding the two pieces together.