The CB1100 Community Forum

Gentlemen,

As a General Motors dealer from 1979 to 1999 I can assure you that building anything but the highest quality vehicles possible in their respective price ranges is a loosing proposition. We all watched Toyota and Honda take market share away from the Big 3 every year and product quality was the #1 reason. Gas mileage was 2nd. The comfort, style, power, and safety of American cars was still considered superior by most drivers back then but reliability and quality lagged far behind the Japanese makers.

As it is in personal relationships, trust in a brand is easy to gain (think Saturn), and easy to loose (Saturn again). But once lost, trust is extremely hard to regain. American car makers are still paying the price today in public trust for the poor quality products they made 20 years ago but they are making headway and they are not doing it by building disposable poor quality products.

Harley Davidson and the British makers got killed by Honda "quality" in the 60's and 70's. Today HD and Triumph make world class quality bikes.

Building anything but the highest quality products in a price range is road to decline and failure. And with today's unlimited access to information that is truer than ever. All the best.

Chip

(02-19-2014, 01:30 PM)Red Mist_imp Wrote: [ -> ]

(02-19-2014, 08:07 AM)calamarichris_imp Wrote: [ -> ]There's a difference between an assumption and an identifiable incentive.

Look at bicycles, as another example. For decades, they were made out of steel, and lasted forever. Those were lean years for the bicycle manufacturers and many went under. A typical steel bicycle frame will, without incident, outlive it's rider. Sell a bike, lose a customer.
So now bicycles are made out of carbon fiber--basically carbon-reinforced plastic. As soon as you get one little nick in the carbon-fiber frame, or a deep-enough scratch, the carbon matrix structure is compromised and the frame is considered used up. Now the bicycle builders Trek, Specialized, Felt, Cannondale, etc. are all making money hand-over-fist because we consumers are more focused on the magazine articles, performance, lightweight than we are about longevity.
And motorcycle reviews pretty focus in the same direction: quarter-mile times, dry weights, hp figures. The longest long-term review of a motorcycle I ever saw was about 9000 miles--barely even broken in.

This is exactly right. Talk about needing next year's frame before your current one is broken in...and guys are spending far more than the cost of CB1100 for a bicycle and frame. Far, far more in some cases.

Some guys have to have the latest and lightest and will buy a new frame just to save a few grams of weight. Seriously, a few grams. I know of a guy whose carbon frame exploded (they are under extreme tension) when he had an accident and the sharp slivers imbedded themselves in his leg. Took hours of surgery to clean it up. Not going to have that happen with steel or titanium or aluminium.

(02-19-2014, 12:53 PM)calamarichris_imp Wrote: [ -> ]

(02-19-2014, 11:02 AM)Aussieflyer_imp Wrote: [ -> ]So what do we mean by quality ... the life span of a component on the bike in isolation or the entire package/product? Taking the view of the entire product I think the quality of today's products is well above those products of yesteryear. I can only speak from my experiences and looking at my vehicles from the 60s through 80s which had more metal in them, were heavier and gave an impression of being solid but by today's standards they perform poorly in terms speed, handling, fuel efficiency and safety, and had more things go wrong with them plus wear out quicker in some areas. Sure there are exceptions but on average it just seems like today's products and the lubricants used in them give us excellent longevity of the total package for the work output we demand of it.

Everyone draws that line at a different point on the spectrum (and many of us let the magazines draw that line for us), but if a model is released with tolerances to a thousandths of a millimeter, is its quality still acceptable if the material of which they're constructed is electroplated paper-mache?

Everyone draws that line at a different point on the spectrum (and many of us let the magazines draw that line for us), but if a model is released with tolerances to a thousandths of a millimeter, is its quality still acceptable if the material of which they're constructed is electroplated paper-mache?

That was a pretty cool bike, but I just spoke to someone who had the same experience as you did. Just after 50,000 miles it really started having problems.

I didn't "start having problems" with the Superhawk. It was burning oil and lost all compression--plumb wore out and used up.
Granted, I rode 50K in about 2.5 years, but the oil (Honda synthetic HP-4) & filter were changed every 3000 miles, and all valve adjustments and other maintenance were done on time.

(02-19-2014, 01:53 PM)The ferret_imp Wrote: [ -> ]Chris heres an interesting list of high mileage VTRs I found while cruising the net. Some have quite high mileage....several over 100,000 miles, many more over 50,000. Common probs seem to be water pump weep holes leaking and cam chain tensioners it seems. No one is complaining about out of round cylinders that I read. All seem really pleased with the quality of their bikes. I don't know, is it possible you got the odd bad one?

http://micapeak.com/reg/view2/VTR

You know the average rider rides probably under 5000 miles a year, it would take 20 years to rack up 100,000 on 1 bike...and few keep them that long. Even pretty hard core riders do around 10,000 miles a year and it would take 10 years to rack up 100,000. Not many keep the same bike for 10 years either. If you are setting 100,000 miles as a benchmark for measuring quality, few are going to climb that mountain.

I consider myself pretty hard core. I live in the midwest yet still manage to ride generally some in every month of the year, take a couple multi day multi state trips a year (last year I did 3 of them) and I average around 12,000 miles a year. I would have to ride every mile I ride, on the same bike for over 8 years to see that kind of mileage. At this point, at soon to be 64, I doubt I'll be riding that long and even then my mileage will get split between several bikes. By my calculations when I reach my goal of riding until I'm 70, I should rack up another 70 something thousand miles. I may never find out if my bikes are quality made..or not.

Thanks Ferret. Somewhere in there is my VTR, and also my ZX9R, maybe also my W650. Unfortunately I wasn't able to view your link.
My VTR was still rolling and running at 50,000 miles, but it was burning a lot of oil. Then when I swapped bikes for a few hours with my ex-wife's ZX6R, that little 600 felt so strong and torquey compared to my 1000. I'd become gradually acclimated to the fact that my once mighty 1000cc V-twin had become feeble. Frog soup.
So I took it in to get a compression test done. Zero-point-Zero psi on both cylinders. Perhaps those high-mileage VTR owners mentioned something about oil consumption?

I agree with many of the comments in here about shoddy quality (and the VTR's quality problem was in its flawed design) leading to a company's decline & failure in the information age, except for three big fat loopholes:
~Only a small minority of us are actually keeping & riding the things enough to expect 100,000 miles.
~Those few are easily dismissed as an occasional, rare lemon, a previous owner's abuse/neglect, or just bitter hotheads.
~Our own short attention spans. Who cares about shortcuts, bad choices, or outright disposabikes a company has made in the past, when we're more interested in the bells-n-whistles on next year's pretty model? It therefore makes sense to take a little money out of the design, testing, production, or materials, and spend it on marketing instead.

Despite BMW's major F-you's to their customers in the past (the surging issue, the grenading shaft drives, and the various problems with the F800's rear end), people still buy them up and generally consider them a quality product, a machine for high-miles riders, and even a reputable company, (which they're absolutely not.)

What Chip said. It applies to any durable goods product.

As far as the Honda; it's just one data point (two if we assume your buddy had the exact same problem) which over the total population of machines built means statistically nothing. We'd need a lot more data points to draw a reasonable conclusion. Even then, when YOU are the person the negative experience happens to, well, that's bad. It's like saying hit by lightening is highly unlikely unless YOU are the person hit.

So it sucks you had a bad experience with one model, we don't know the cause of the problem, just the aftermath. You will be over reaching by drawing any conclusions from it; e.g. quality control, build quality, reliability predictions etc.

Thanks for proving my point.

I have a Chevy Cavalier with 300,000 miles and an F150 who just reached 200,000 miles, but the 1984 magna only 35,000 miles. I should ride on two wheels more.

Sent from my SM-T217S using Tapatalk

(02-19-2014, 08:07 AM)calamarichris_imp Wrote: [ -> ]There's a difference between an assumption and an identifiable incentive.

Look at bicycles, as another example. For decades, they were made out of steel, and lasted forever. Those were lean years for the bicycle manufacturers and many went under. A typical steel bicycle frame will, without incident, outlive it's rider. Sell a bike, lose a customer.
So now bicycles are made out of carbon fiber--basically carbon-reinforced plastic. As soon as you get one little nick in the carbon-fiber frame, or a deep-enough scratch, the carbon matrix structure is compromised and the frame is considered used up. Now the bicycle builders Trek, Specialized, Felt, Cannondale, etc. are all making money hand-over-fist because we consumers are more focused on the magazine articles, performance, lightweight than we are about longevity.
And motorcycle reviews pretty focus in the same direction: quarter-mile times, dry weights, hp figures. The longest long-term review of a motorcycle I ever saw was about 9000 miles--barely even broken in.

Correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. In this case, it doesn't. At all. Bicycles are made out of carbon fiber because they are lighter, not because they manufacturer is looking to make the product obsolesce at a faster rate. The consumer's priority is weight first, and and longevity somewhere after that. Also, you're talking about a very specialized market. Very few people purchase multi-thousand dollar bicycles. I have one bicycle, I think it cost around $700, and if I recall correctly, it is made out of aluminum. It will last forever. I might have to replace the cranks or brake discs or something one day, but I won't be buying a new bicycle, ever. In this, more normal range (_many_ people would still balk at what I paid for my bicycle) , these bicycles last (effectively) forever.

Anyway, the thing I'm talking about is the motivation, and I do not believe that there is a durable goods product manufacturer on Earth any more that believes the way to get more people to buy their product is to design in timed failure. The way to do it is to design better products in subsequent product cycles and stoke your marketing department to convince the public their 2 year old Whatsitmobile is now inferior because it doesn't have brand-new feature xyz.

I had Superhawk. It was a great bike. The only
problems I had were I had to take Tylenol before the
ride and I could only see my elbows in the rear view
mirrors.

How long did you have it? How many miles did you put on it? And why Tylenol? (Aftermarket exhausts?)

It was a fun and beautiful bike, but it had a few other major problems. Feeble brakes, terrible fuel economy, speedometer was way off, a 1000cc twin with the peformance of a 600 I-4, and while the rearward weight bias made the Superhawk a wheelie-monstah, it also made the bike handle strange; the front tire would make a scary howling noise when cornering fast enough.
None of the front tires I tried ever let go, but they all made that noise, and they wore out almost 1-to-1 with rear tires.
Just about every other bike I've had used about two rear tires per front tire.

Edit: Oh yeah, and even though I kept it stock, it was a mushroom-cloud layin' mutha. It backfired sometimes when braking, and sometimes when starting. My friend James had these carbon-fiber Acrapovic mufflers on his VTR and shattered his right muffler while starting his bike in front of a Starbucks once--scared the bejeezus out of everyone there.

Well he wasn't riding an ADV with aluminum side cases with stickers all over them or BMW or a Ducati..no wonder it blew up in a Starbucks parking lot. It was heresy that caused it to backfire lol

(02-20-2014, 02:46 AM)calamarichris_imp Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for proving my point.

Or perhaps Chris, you've proven his point.

When you say that the vast majority of people treat motorcycles like toys and buy a new one every other year, you're not describing the majority of people that I know who ride. I'd say that description is actually the exception rather than the rule. If that were truly the case, motorcycle sales in this country would never have slumped like they have since 2005.