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Does this helmet make me look fat?

3K views 45 replies 14 participants last post by  firepower354 
#1 ·
My wife's friend came over tonight on her sidecar rig and let me take my son for a ride in it, in exchange for fixing her two weedeaters. It was my first as a sidecar driver (I'd ridden in one attached to an old BMW once before) and it was a hoot! I stayed on grassy pasture but did experiment with "flying" the chair on some tight right turns. Easy, at 15 mph.



Also cool was the somewhat rare bike propelling the sidecar; a 1977 CB750A. Sort of like riding a bike with a powerglide in it. Owning a CB750A would be fun, assuming they're reliable. Wife's friend hasn't broken anything yet, and she's had it about a year.
 

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#4 ·
Thanks, guys...yeah, it is a cool bike. I got to ride it as a solo last year, shortly after she got it. Took it out for an hour and a half, actually, and rode it all over the place. It was interesting.



If you've never ridden one, it's got a fluid torque converter like a car, no clutch control, and a Neutral-Low-Drive foot shift. You have to shift it with your foot from one ratio to the other, unlike a car, but it can easily get up to 45-50 in low and once it's warm it seems pretty comfortable taking off from a dead stop in Drive. I thought it felt best to take off in Low, shifting up somewhere in the 25-35 mph range, depending on how much I wanted to accelerate vs. take it easy.



The round thing you'd expect to be a tach housing is actually pretty much a blank-faced thing with a couple idiot lights in it...N, L, D and I think oil temperature or oil pressure or something. You'd have to try pretty hard to over-rev this thing. I would guess when I felt the top of the powerband approaching and shifted up I was probably no higher than 7500-8000 (this is last year, riding it solo, not out in the pasture with the sidecar!) and I seem to remember the normal 750F redlining at 9500 and pulling up into that range pretty eagerly.



Highly enthusiastic specifications research after that ride informed me that the automatic 750s were detuned quite a bit, presumably to broaden the torque curve for the two gears. Lower compression and quite a bit smaller carbs. It's been several years, at least, since I've ridden a normal CB750F, but it would be interesting to compare the two back-to-back.



It's not that I mind shifting/clutching, but I really thought the 750A was a pleasant all-around ride. All I could really complain about with it was that the forks and shocks seemed kind of tired and boingy at any kind of spirited cornering attempt. Can't really bitch about that on a bike that old. The seals don't leak and the bike is pretty cherry and the lady who rides it is quite a bit lighter than me, so for her it might not be an issue anyway.
 
#6 ·
I had a cb750 sohc and a cb750 dohc, I think the sohc was a cb750a I didn't own it more than a couple days before I sold it for more than I paid for it, so can't remember too much about it.





it is all the good food I am sure your wife makes that adds to the extra padding, not the helmet
 
#8 ·
z50 chopper said:
it is all the good food I am sure your wife makes that adds to the extra padding, not the helmet


It is I who cooks for mi esposa y my hijo. I cannot blame this on her.



firepower354 said:
I was looking for an "A", even a 400 recently. I really am that lazy. An 836 kit, F cam and carbs might be fun, but like you said, it ain't broke.


Oddly, after our friend got this one, I noticed two or three of them for sale on Craigslist around here. Before that I remember seeing one, at a swap meet in Denver when I was a little kid and it must have been pretty new.



There must have been some kind of "lazy avoidance stigma" that kept them from selling well. I've never come across evidence that the drivetrain was problematic, and I've even heard somewhere that Russ Collins had a 750A-based dragbike. You could argue that combining the bike experience with the Powerglide experience isn't as sporty, but it still gets down the road pretty quick and--to me, at least--had its own appeal. I'm surprised some of the people who ended up buying early GL1000s weren't more attracted to the 750A, given its obvious lack of cooling complexity, fuel pump, etc.



Having a broken 750A or GL1000 probably wouldn't be too fun nowadays.
 
#9 ·
I love the look on your boys face. He's obviously taken a ride with Dad before. Got the death grip and the visor down for aerodynamics!!!



Last pic you sent me didn't have so much grey in that beard! My wife says it's distinguishing! (lying to me same way I lie to her about the dress I hate!)
 
#16 ·
How did you get a picture of me on your property riding an automatic 750? That helmet reminds me of the first time I got shot out of a cannon. But as Hunter S. Thompson said, "its' better to be shot out of a cannon than squeezed from a tube"



There was a Hawk 400A at the bike show last month. It was nice but the guy wanted like 4 Gs for it. My friend the retired Honda mechanic has only good things to say about the 400A. We never talked about the 750A...
 
#17 ·
I just saw a 400A on Craigslist, for something like $1,000-$1,200. It looked pretty sharp. I've never seen on of those in real life, but in the picture the motor looked a lot like the CM/Hawk series twin, with the sort of clamshell-lid valve cover. I believe I've heard that they had chain-driven counterbalancers and 360-degree cranks...anyone know if they are automatic versions of CMs and whether they have that type of crank?



I'm interested in that because I think parallel twins with 360-degree cranks (old britbikes, XS650s) sound like hi-octane manic britbike Steve McQueen badassness, whereas twins with 180 degree cranks (CB450s, many other Hondas, LTD454s, EX500s) sound like lawnmowers. At least until they get up around 7K-8K rpm.



I used to think about that when I'd race my friend's LTD454 with my XS650. I'd get the holeshot and would be digging the sound from my homemade exhaust and suddenly this tornado would woosh by and he'd be eight bike lengths ahead and disappearing fast. It seemed like bad sportsmanship to comment on how hokey the fake cruiser styling of that thing was when it could totally hand me my azz like that. That guy eventually upgraded to a 1200 Sportster, and from what I could tell the fake cruiser LTD454 was a totally dead-reliable easy bike to live with, was quicker than the Sportster, and cost many thousands less.
 
#21 ·
My first real motorcycle encounter was when I was about four or so, and my dad's friend would come over on his CB550F...the bike couldn't have been more than a year or two old then. It had the barrel-shaped squishy grips and the '70s-approved wedgy Vetter fairing, and I used to love to sit on it and look at those pretty little lozenge-shaped idiot lights between the gauges. The guy would huck it up on the centerstand, put it in neutral--"ooh! look! pretty greeeeeeeeen...." and start it. He'd let me rev it a little--"scary! cool! wow!"--and flip the turn signals on--"ooh! pretty amber!" One of my parents took a picture of me doing all this, in my underwear, legs dangling a long way from the ground. This is a vivid memory and I still love the look of CBs because of it. Also the growly, kind of choppy sound they have at idle and low rpms. Not like the modern sportbike shop-vac sound at all. I've never owned a CB750, or a four-cylinder bike at all, really, but I've ridden various friends' CB550s and 750s and it always amazes me how I remember it as being like straddling Noah's Ark back then and now they're just kind of wide, kind of heavy but they just don't seem that big anymore. For some reason I can't quite get my head around that. I had a CB450 twin for a long time and when I see photos of myself on it the bike looks small! And I'm only about 5'9" anyway.



Doops is going to pipe up next with something about burritos sneaking around my waistline. Right?



Also, I didn't mean what I said in the above post as a Harley slam. I got to ride that Sportster and thought it was pretty cool. But always thought it was a shame the 454 was seen--in that case, at least--as the starter model, when it seemed like all the bike 90% of motorcyclists would ever need, styling aside.
 
#23 ·
No, no, hey man...really.



Wheelying a 185 Twinstar sounds like an interesting story, actually. Go ahead. Another friend had a ??CM200?? that looked like a 185 twinstar...single carb, four-speed trans...cute little bike but I couldn't wheely it when I tried. I was thinner then, too. Maybe that was the problem; not enough rearward weight shift...?



Actually, now that I think about it, that bike sounded like it had a 360-degree crank. It sounded pretty cool.
 
#24 ·
well the kid that owned it was short and maybe weighed 100lbs wet so I would have to get on the back of the thing just to give it a little help...nothing like 12 o'clocking a beginner cruiser before there was ever a 12 o'clock bar......never needed to trim my nails 'cuz it was a knuckle dragging experience........after we wore the heck out of the Twinstar, Honda came out with the first V65 Magna and little shrimp boy was the first to get one......yep that day I found out what 165mph feels like...I think I was 16 maybe

the Twinstar



the V65

 
#25 ·
The CM200 guy I knew was a small guy also, and eventually went on to experiment with extreme triple-digit speeds on a TL1000 before getting out of street bikes.



If there's one thing I know, it's that I never, ever want to experience 165 mph on a bike. I haven't been past 105 myself, and that was momentary, on an R80/7. It was so easy and undramatic, and I'd have been so vaporized if a deer had stepped out into the highway or something.



Now I like doing a full one-handed tuck on my hardtail, winding it way out to 32 mph or so. I've gotten a little older.
 
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