I remember a few of you have reported their experience with tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS), and I have seen them at Amazon etc. The latest, and quite liked by the press came from Michelin. Like the earlier systems it relies on pressure sensors installed onto the valve. The truth is, I don't like that design. From centrifugal forces, theft, and funny little batteries, the extra weight on the valve stem ... and the fact that there is no way to properly measure tire temperature this way ... not my cup of tea.

Has anybody come across a system with sensors which are glued right inside the rim (and inside the tire) during tire change ? With long-lasting Li batteries this seems the ideal location for me.

I’m posting this to share my experience with my 2013 CB1100 which I purchased in excellent condition with only 8k miles. I installed new Dunlop tires after the purchase, that’s all it needed. For some background I’m 52 years old, ride both street and dirt, and have been riding motorcycles since I was in middle school. I have owned many bikes of all styles including American, Italian, European, and Japanese.

Overall opinion: the CB looks beautiful but is a terrible bike to live with.

Riding experience: very top heavy, the bike seems to weigh a ton, inadequate mushy suspension, especially with a passenger, excessive fork dive when braking, and is unbearably uncomfortable after 40 minutes of riding. Everything about the seat is wrong for the driver, and the passenger seat is not stepped and too narrow, so the passenger view and experience are terrible as well. Yes, I tried another seat, Corbin, it helped a bit but not enough.

Fit and finish: The wheels are beautiful, as is the bike in general, but the odd 18” rear tire size really limits your tire choices, not to mention tire cost. The wheels started to loose their finish in multiple spots, which I have not seen on other Hondas. The exhaust is beautiful looking when new, however my header pipe completely discolored and looked terrible as it is unfinished stainless steel of some unknown quality. In contrast my 1994 CB1000 header still looks brand new and shiny at almost 30 years old.

Now the worst part, the engine. The driveline lash is sloppy and annoying. The valve clearance adjustment intervals are at 8k miles. This is completely unacceptable. Even worse, this is a shim under bucket design require pulling the cams to adjust, which is a huge job and completely unnecessary. 1984 Honda Nighthawks had a similar motor with similar redline, but had hydraulic valve adjusters meaning they never needed adjustment. Why Honda? You couldn’t open your 30 year old Nighthawk engine manual to see how this is done? Maybe it would have added a half inch to the engine height? Even if you insisted on manual adjustment, give us home mechanics some screw type adjusters. This is not a race motor and doesn’t demand expensive shim adjusters. A minor complaint was the five speed transmission, which in top gear was still running more RPMs than necessary for the torque of this engine. I understand the ‘14 got a six speed, but it also got crappy hand controls in the process.

Ok, the engine starts and runs just fine and has decent power for what it is. No complaints in the engine performance department.

I am a Honda fan to say the least, my current Honda bikes include an 89 CB400F, 89 Hawk GT 650, 1990 NSR250SP, 1991 CBR600F2, 1994 CB1000, and a 2006 ST1300. That might sound excessive but they are mostly low dollar investments, I enjoy tinkering, and I enjoy different riding experiences. I was excited to buy the 2013 CB, even tried a Corbin seat, but after trying to live with the CB, it had to go. My 94 CB1000 remains and is better in every way than the 13 CB1100 which I thought would replace it.

This can’t be just my opinion. Almost every CB1100 I see for sale has less than 10k miles on it. This is not a coincidence. The uncomfortable nature of these bikes will ensure low miles.

I usually don’t post in forums after I no longer own the bike, but I wish someone would have let me in on this secret when I was looking to buy a CB.

If you know me, then you know I am a HUGE fan of the movie TOP GUN. So today, I got to check off one of my bucket list items. The house that Kelly McGillis (Charlie) asks Tom Cruise (Maverick) over for dinner... is still standing in Oceanside California. I found it !!! A developer moved it a few 100 feet from the corner it was on so they could build condos on the corner. The Oceanside Historical Society declared the "Top Gun" house a historical landmark because of the movie. They are currently renovating it and making it an Ice Cream Store. Here is me and my CB1100 at the same house from TOP GUN !!! YEAH !!!

If there is one thing I know about motorcycling it's if you ride at some point you will go down and I have a couple of times in my life. I recognize that this is the risk I must take to do the thing I love and in the 5 years since I started riding again I have been fortunate to stay upright the entire time. But I'm riding at least 15k miles per year and I realize the odds are getting shorter every mile I ride.

So I've started researching air vests in the hopes of mitigating the damage to some degree when that day comes. I've looked at the Helite and other corded vests and economically they seem to make the most sense but I'm a forgetful person so I know I would definitely forget to unhook the cord when getting off and I'd likely many times forget to hook it up before riding rendering it useless. I was riding with a buddy recently that has a Helite and he was complaining to me on intercom that he had forgotten to hook it up and he was trying to while riding and I'm thinking he was probably going to run off the road trying to get the darn thing hooked up. Wouldn't that be ironic?

So I've been looking at the electronic vests, specifically the Klim AI-1. Some complain that it's a subscription based model but I don't mind that. The vest plus two years of subscription is about the same as the Helite vest and as part of the subscription they replace the electronics after 3 years. It doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

So has anyone had experience with the Klim vest? I'd also like to hear about other vests as well. I'm leaning towards the Klim but I'm not sold yet.

There seems to be some debate about the number of Deluxe models sent to the US as 2014 models. I have seen numbers from 299 to 500. SC65 in the VIN denotes a Deluxe. The VIN sequence starts with 000001. I know of sequence # 176 and 244. What other sequence #'s belong to Forum members? This info will give us an idea of how many were built. Chime in if you have one.

Forgive me if you already know this, but translating documents into English from, for example, Japanese or Chinese, is quite easy and straightforwad using a smartphone.

I shipped in a car from Japan last year. Understandably, I needed to read documents (not least, the car's instruction book) but by using the Google Translation app, setting it to "Camera" and pointing the 'phone at the Japanese writing, up came the translation into.English!

Importing items for the CB1100 from Japan, this translation app is proving extremely useful.

In case anyone wasn't aware of this.

This is pretty weird... my typical weekday commute is down the car pool lane or splitting between crawling traffic on a crowded freeway. Over the holidays it lightened up considerably, but I had expected it to return to normal with the new year, especially after a week in, when the kids went back to school. But, so far, it's been very light, running at weekend speeds.

Not sure if it's omicron, or the growing "anti-work" movement I've been hearing about, but it's weird. So far on the little 300, I've been running with the herd in the right lanes or doing 80 on the bigger bikes, and it would be just as fast to drive my car to work.

I shouldn't complain about a lack of traffic, I suppose...

A while ago I told the story of an adventure with lucky outcome which many of you liked: The story of the frog in cooking water, and where a CB should never go ... (link [url=http://cb1100forum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=17137&pid=301418#pid301418/]The Frog ).

Inspired by days and days of freezing rain, grayness in the sky, and new Covid restrictions, I had been waiting for the sun, like one of the holy baboons waiting for Ra (God of the ancient Egyptians), back 3300 years bathing in the morning sun after a freezing night (link [url=https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysteries-of-ancient-egypts-sacred-baboons-revealed/]Holy Baboons. And today Ra showed his face to me - with all might. Not a drop of water, haze or cloud in the air or in the sky. Subfreezing temperatures, icy wind, a perfectly polished motorcycle in the garage, gas in the tank, and ... nothing but a leather jacket, a helmet, and some winter-gloves which (I know now) are not worth the designation. Guess I never bothered buying solid winter riding equipment.

We roll out of the garage into the sun and I feel already ... a little better and a little colder. Off we go. Familiar streets, familiar fields and scenery. Man this is cold. But the frog's heart feels good. There is no traffic today. Has the cold made everybody stay at home ? The windy road is mine. And admittedly, it's immediately hard to pull the clutch and control the release. My fingers itch, my eyes tear, and the frog starts to feel toes and butt. SO WHAT ! We keep going. 10 miles, 20 miles, ... I don't know. What a joy. At some point I stop, and feel engine temps, tires, even the temperature of the chain. Is the sound of hers even nicer today ? This marvel of Japanese M/C is not only working like a charm. She is really happy in these temps. But the frog on top is getting to his limits. For all the joy I must have lost all sense for the frog's overall condition. And I still have to go home - ups ... against the wind, and the sun no longer in my face.

The feeling of joy is amplified in every bend, the sensation of "being" out in the wild, being alive which no sofa, no S.U.V. and no TV can deliver. When we finally make it, the garage door closes behind me, the cooling engine starts making the clicking sounds of an air-cooled 4, and shoes and gloves off - the smile on my face is hard to describe. The conditions of my butt and toes, I'd rather not describe at all.

A frog can die in too hot or too cold water, but the worst of all outcomes is ... he is lying in a lukewarm puddle for too long, with nowhere to go, staying at a homely temperature, slowly loosing his mind. In an over-regulated, pampered and often frighten world, where (as Nietzsche said) "the world gets safer and safer for little Chinese men, it only costs ever more electricity", the CB doesn't turn a frog into a Voyageur (link: [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyageurs/]Voyageurs, or my home town not into the Wild West. But it helps me stay sane in the hottest and coldest of waters, and brings about a smile at the turn of a key. What else, who else, is able to do this ?

From an earlier thread, I bought a used '21 CB300R the week before Christmas, to replace the CB1100 as a daily commute mule, reserve the 1100 for occasional pleasure riding, and to have something small and light for Mrs. Gone's first bike when she decides she's ready to start riding. The original owner was close to my Mom's house in north San Diego, so I tucked the bike in her garage, and would bring it home after the holiday hustle was over.

We spent the weekend with Mom, and I brought the little bike home yesterday. I did receive the requisite guilt line from Mom... "Maybe I should keep putting motorcycles in my garage so you'll visit more..." Yes, Mom...

Since the original owner tucked the bike in the back of his garage after putting 500 miles on it, it is coated in a year of dust, and I assumed no maintenance had been done to it. So, first order of business was to put the tires at the correct pressures and change the oil before hitting the highway. Everything about this bike is cute and tiny... even the oil capacity, 1.5 qt. The first stop was the gas station, as only one blip was showing on the gas gauge. 1.7 gallons to fill. Neat! Guys on other forums are reporting 200 miles of range on a tank.

I didn't want to flog the little bugger on an 80 mile freeway run, especially on a late Sunday morning when flow of traffic would be at maximum speed. I was able to enjoy a relaxed coastal ride up through the city of Oceanside to get used to the bike, but north of that lies Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, with the only option to traverse being the I5 freeway, which flows at 80 mph. On the freeway we went, and I was surprised that she brapped up to 70 mph very eagerly, with more on tap. It was a bit disorienting to look down at the tach, showing a number much higher than I'm used to, but I'm also not used to a small single cylinder engine spinning under me. I parked in the right lane and cruised, leapfrogging motorhomes and semi trucks. She's amazingly stable at freeway speed, even going around large semis. No wind blast, which I found unusual, as this bike has literally no front end. It's like there's nothing there in front of the handlebars. I don't even think I'll bother with a windscreen.

North of Camp Pendleton, I got off of the freeway and enjoyed the coast up through Laguna Beach, then turning north and heading up through Santiago Canyon to home. She's a fun little ride in the twisty stuff.

Mrs. Gone had driven straight home, so she got there about an hour before me, and was happy to see that we got home safe, and nervously asked how the bike did on the freeway. With such a small engine, her concern was that it won't have the beans to make my daily commutes, and that I won't want to ride it much, thereby putting more pressure on her to take her lessons and start riding. "Does it have enough power?" Yes dear. "Oh good, I don't feel so much pressure now." No dear, it will be ready whenever you are.

I took it to work for the first time today, expecting to enjoy its narrow frame through tight traffic. But, for whatever reason, freeway traffic on my daily route was weekend-light. Is today a holiday I don't know about?

It's a really neat little bike. At low speeds, it reminds me of the scooter I run around events with for work, but it can hang at reasonable highway speeds with no problem. I won't be taking it on weekend trips, but for the daily slog, it will do the job. The ergonomics for such a small bike are very good for my 5' 9" ish size, and it's light enough that Mrs. Gone can push it around in the garage if she needs to without fear.

Well, after pushing and pulling and greasing and soaping, i finally get a suggestion from a friend to use a sheep castration tool to install the RLETS. Ladies and gentlement, this is a game changer. Behold!
https://youtu.be/FuWG1r7AN0g

One handed RLET installation in 3 seconds!!!!!

Love this forum... Will