The CB1100 Community Forum

My cousin and I started riding together recently. He was coming back to riding after an absence and I was new. I bought a 500 lbs 50 hp 2014 ctx700 brand new on clearance. He bought a 1982 450 t-hawk with 45 hp and much lighter.

I paid $5000 and he paid $500. His bike spent a week in a local shop getting safeties and having all the gremlins removed. I sold my bike in February for $4500 and put that money down on a cb1100, he sold his bike for $400. I really like vintage bikes, but I also like to travel far. I don't know if I would have trusted the old t-hawk for some of the adventures I've done.

I'm a big guy so I handled the weight of the ctx and cb pretty well and the only reason I found the ctx easier to move was the seat height gave me more leverage. I am able to drive both bikes at any speed required, 5, 10, 50, 60, 100 km/hr is a breeze. If someone tells you a bike is too powerful they are saying you lack the judgement and control to properly operate it. After having my licence for a month I went to a Honda demo day to try a few other bikes as I'd only ridden a grom and a ctx700 and wanted to experience other bikes. They wouldn't let me ride an RR because of my m2 licence but were perfectly happy to put me on a VFR800. The vfr is around 115 hp, which is inline with many 600cc RR bikes. I followed the group no problem. I guess the big question is what do you trust yourself with? I like to accelerate and corner hard, but I don't like to break the speed limit by too much, so I doubt my riding would change that much if I was on a more powerful bike.

My experience was more like a Honda trampoline. I started riding in 2012 as a 53 year old with an '82 CM450E, came down to an '09 CRF230M and bounced up to the '14 CB1100 Deluxe. I put about two and a half years on each of the first two bikes. I've had the CB1100 since March. The only thing I really grapple with still is the weight of the bike, not the power.

As a Christian, I once heard it said (I think by Chuck Swindoll) that the last thing to get saved on your body was your right foot, alluding to everyone's general inkling to press past posted speed limits. In my five years of motorcycling, my sin nature has not had its way with my right hand as it did/does with my right foot. It's the weight, not the power or speed for me.

I started out on a '76 Kaw KZ400 because it was all the bike I could afford. It turned out to be an excellent bike to learn on (yes, I also learned some wrenching skills as well).

It's lower weight and power output meant that it was much more forgiving of noob blunders than the larger, more powerful bikes. They didn't have MSF courses back then, so I learned a lot from my many novice mistakes on the little KZ.

I learned to fly in a light 2 seat Cessna trainer. I could have learned on something bigger and faster, but the same logic applies. You want to make most of your early mistakes in something that will not punish you severely for them.

I started riding in 1963 long before I could drive a car, so it has been something I
have always done.
Once I opened my store a lot of people came to me about what bike to buy as their first one. I had a one line answer. Buy the newest smallest bike you can afford . A lot of times I would see young people buy large older bikes that needed
so much work that they wasted a lot of money on repairs. - It did help out with
sales in my store though.