Hey everyone,

It has been a long while, and some bitter sweet news. I just listed my 2014 cb1100 for sale but I'll be picking up a 26 cb1000f tomorrow. 

Full turn key, ready to go, never crashed, dropped, or laid down. 24769 miles on the clock right now.

- Clutch was replaced at 24k miles. EBC fibers and HD springs, new OEM Steels and judder spring.
- The T32 Tires have less then 4000 miles on them.
- Oil, oil filter, and chain have been serviced every 3000 miles.
- Brake and Clutch Fluid changed once a year.
- Brake pads were replaced around 14k miles and still look great.
- Last year the valve cover gasket (seeped a little) was replaced and has been bone dry ever since.

I have a full service history for the bike. Its always been garage stored, and stored with fresh fluids for winter.

The bike has a dart flyscreen, CB500 mirrors, Arrow slip on, SWMotech saddle bags, and a SWMotech rear luggage rack, oil cooler brace, crash bars and tank grips. I'm keeping my RLETs but I'll be including the factory slip on, and other OEM parts.

I am currently asking $5200.00 OBO. Let me know if you all think I'm priced too high, these are fairly hard to come by in my area so I'm not really sure where to put it.

I should mention I'm located in Oregon. But I can meet a serious buyer somewhere.








<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="sVNh1Z0"><a href="https://imgur.com/sVNh1Z0">View post on imgur.com</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

A while back, I had... an incident. I think I mentioned it here. My boss' house, way up in the Hollywood Hills, is on a twisty street that's very narrow and cut into the side of the mountain that leads up to the Hollywood sign. To make the road somewhat level, the houses on the uphill side are cut in with some bizarre steep driveways. The boss' driveway is more than a 45-degree angle for the approach, a narrow paved ramp up to a wide landing pad big enough for three cars and our fleet of six bikes. There's an equally narrow and steep down ramp to the street. It's steep enough that I wouldn't dare try to drive my low Fiesta ST up, as it's still pristine 11-year old facia would auger into the pavement. Our 2-wheel-drive CRV just churns it's Kumhos half-way up. 

I had never really thought about riding up the inbound driveway. Just throttle, aim, and climb. Due to the tight turn before the driveway you can't really see where everything is parked until you're committed to the climb. I just did it.  Till one day, half-way up, boss' girlfriend's Volvo was parked in a slightly different spot, and as I tried to course-correct, I pulled in the clutch and fell over. It was sudden and startling. I did a tuck and roll away as the bike went past the point of no return. My left leg was on the downhill side of the approach and had nowhere to go looking for ground to stabilize the bike. The boss heard the crunch (also my right hand zinging the throttle to the moon as I went over).

He came out with a laugh. A cop bike is a rolling roll bar, so no damage to speak of, the crash bars on all of the bikes have scars. The only other part that touches ground is the mirror, and it folds in on impact leaving a slight scratch that was already there from dozens of drops during service. My Helite airbag vest had gone off startling me even more though. He said "Oh good, you got to see how the airbag works. It's good experience for you!" Took us both to lift the 800 pound beast from falling on the downhill side, and we pushed it to the landing pad main driveway. He laughed it off, saying "We've all done it, don't worry." I was shaken though. 

His garage is HQ for the company, and it's very common for me to go there after a drop-off, to pick up supplies and bike parts, work on a bike, or meet up with one of our other riders. Now I felt like the driveway was some impossible mountain. The ride home from his house puts me on a different trajectory than my usual route coming back from the blood research lab. I'm on the 101 in the thickest Hollywood traffic with no carpool lane to take advantage of. It funnels through the center of Downtown LA. Coming from the lab, I'm on the 405, riding the most crowded freeway corridor in the U.S., but I have a wide divider between carpool and regular lanes to take advantage of. My confidence was a bit shaken on that ride home through LA. But, I got home. Doing some work on the bike, I slipped in my own driveway and dropped it again. Twice in one day. I was struggling to lift it when an Amazon driver in my cul de sac came by and offered to help. She held the brake lever while I used all of my strength to lift the bike. 

Now my mind was really sort of damaged. I could thread this bike through any traffic you could throw in front of me, but now fear of dropping the bikes had stuck to my back like the proverbial monkey. A week later, the boss asked me to swing by on a Sunday afternoon to meet some new riders he was thinking of hiring, and to give them "The Test". Putting them on the service bike and into Hollywood traffic to see how they do. As the "Chief Rider", it's my resposibility to sign off on new riders as far as confidence, competence and understanding of the job. I'm supposed to be the best rider we've got. I like to think that I am. Approaching the boss' house, fear started looming. I got to the bottom of the driveway and stopped. The new guys were already there, and were chatting with the boss inside the house. I craned my neck to see what my approach was going to be. I had never done that, I had just given the bike throttle and gone for it. My right foot was in a sandy spot in the street, I was leaning over to see my line up the driveway, and lost my footing. The bike fell over on the right side in the street. 

Oh man, hope the new guys didn't see that... I struggled to lift the bike, as the boss came out, saying "Well you do like to make an entrance!" We both lifted the bike and I hobbled it up and met the new guys. I was more than embarrassed. 

My confidence with that driveway was gone. Every time I went from then on, I parked on the street below. I made up reasons... well, the gardener is working up there, I don't want to get in his way...
Everywhere else, no problem. I trained the new guys, riding hundreds of miles with them through the thickest traffic imaginable. A few times, I had no choice but to ride up to the top. I needed to swap tires from one bike to another. I stopped at the bottom, stared at the top, and cautiously throttled up, nearly stalling half-way. But, I got there. I can do this... I don't want to, but I can. 

Not too long after that, I was clearing old videos off of my GoPro's SD card. I dumped the contents on my computer and glanced at each before deleting them. The footage was on my CB1100 or NC750X, and was just threading through traffic. Except for two videos, showing me riding both of my bikes to the boss' house and charging up that driveway like it was the easiest thing in the world. I started thinking... if I dropped my CB, I'd be shattered, and here I had ridden it up that driveway plenty of times without a thought. I had ridden the NC up there more times than the CB. No problem. 

I started thinking... what changed me? I wasn't thinking about it, I was just doing what made sense. Speed is stability. Come to the hill, look up the hill, give it throttle, stay off the clutch and brake till you get to the top. Look where you want to stop, not at the cars you want to avoid on the way up. There's nothing more too it than that. I shed the thought I had put in my brain that said "Dammit, you're supposed to be the best rider in the group, prove it" and thought "It's just another hill, and it never bothered you before you dropped. Just ride up it."

So, next time I went, I just throttled, aimed at the empty space at the top between the cars and other bikes, and I ended up there. No drama. I've done it several times since, and realized it's not hard, as long as I don't let it eat me up. If I can do it with my most prized bike, I can do it with a beat up old cop bike. Easy peasy.

When I bought this bike I loved how balanced it was. It never did anything super well but everything it did was really good. The clutch feel was perfect, the power band was smooth, the looks were most of the way there. So when modifying it, I really just wanted an OEM+ approach. Stuff that look like it came from the factory. Subtle yet for anyone who owns one to look at it and go “oh you did this, or that…” With that in mind, most of what I did was for aesthetic reasons. I don’t ride my bikes very aggressively anymore. 95% of my riding is to and from work from march-November (or as long as I can get away with before snow). I’ll just kinda list the mods and if there’s a lot of interest in any of them I may do a separate write up going into as much detail as I remember. 
-17” wheel swap
  -front MT09 wheel
  -Rear MT07 wheel
-OEM cb1100 RS aluminum swingarm
-renthal fat bar mounts with ‘19 cb650 bars
-blinkers upgraded to newer cb650/cb300r/cb1000r leds
-Relocated blinkers to headlight ears
-Arrow muffler 
-Upper fork tube covers 
-Bikemaster brand heated grips with relay for ignition shut off
   

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
                       
                   
           

My buddy Jeff is the proud owner of a 2025 Dax and a 2024 Grom. He invited me to go riding with him on his mini-motos this last Sunday, here in Nothern Kentucky.

Both bikes have been modified with cams and re-mapping. Jeff says they come stock with about 8 HP and his mods bump that to about 10 HP. He also lowered the gearing so both will hit the rev limiter in 1-2-3. This makes them pull harder than stock, but the downside is the fuel economy falls from about 100 mpg to maybe 80 mpg. Not as big a deal on the Grom with a 1.5 US gallon tank, but the Dax has a 1-gallon tank, and you need to keep an eye on it. It also throws the speedo off on both bikes, which is odd because the Dax takes speed off the front wheel, but the Grom takes it off the front sprocket, so no surprise there.

I rode the Dax first, in the morning session. We rode from about 9:30 am to noon, when we stopped for a BBQ lunch in Falmouth, Kentucky. Then I hopped on the Grom and rode it from about 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm.

I enjoyed the seating, arm, and leg position - and great mirrors - of the Dax. I'm only 5'5" tall, so the bike fits me well. Believe it or not, I still could not flat-foot it, ha ha! But it's so light, that doesn't matter at all. I found the cluchless shifter a bit tricky to get used to. It's a heel-toe shifter. I think you're supposed to push down on the toe to downshift and kick down on the heel to upshift. That's all well and good, but my boot didn't cover the heel and toe pedals simultaneously, so it required moving the foot fore and aft to shift this way. I ended up just using toe-under to upshift and toe-on-top to downshift, but the upshift was awkward because you have to reach down pretty far to get a toe under. A couple of times, I accidentally downshifted trying to get my toe under it. If I owned a Dax, I'd probably replace the heel-toe shifter with a regular toe shifter positioned a little higher. I found that to shift, though, you just need to let off the throttle and execute the shift, whereas on downshift, rev-matching is rewarded with the rear tire not unexpectedly grabbing when the lower gear hits.

The Grom has a further modification of bars cut down narrower, which I thought was a good mod. Wider would have seemed odd to me. It also has bar-end mirrors. Jeff said the stock mirrors only show your shoulders. You sit more forward on the Grom, and your knees are slightly more cramped. It's a 5-speed clutch. I felt very natural on it. It has a lot of DNA in common with my CBR250R in terms of the riding stance. I was much more confident and faster on the Grom than the Dax. That being said, I think I enjoyed the Dax more, mainly because it's a very different riding experience than my 250.

I would say that Jeff's HP and gearing improvements are absolutely necessary if you want to run these bikes out in the country at highway (and above) speeds. They would probably be fine stock in the city, beach community, etc. That 125 motor is a stout little beastie. It seems to be bulletproof. We ran them flat-out all day long, often hitting the rev-limiter at 10,000 rpm (stock redline is 7,000) and they never complained or showed any signs of quitting.

The Dax beats the Grom on looks by far. It's cool, vs the Grom which is an ugly little insect bike. My only aesthetic critique of the Dax is I don't like black wheels. I'd prefer silver.

Ciao a tutti
Hi everybody, my name is Oscar and i'm born in 1963, retired Luogotente dei Carabinieri,  now i live near the border with Slovenia, with my family, my father do not have the drive license and for this i was on two wheels from 60 years.
in my life i have bought and sell this motorcycle
moped 50 cc
cagiva sst 125
guzzi v35
moto morini 350 sport
honda cb 750 f
kawasaki z1000rx
cagiva lucky explorer 750 ducati engine
kymco 250
malaguti spidermax 500
suzuki burgman 650
honda integra 700
honda cb 750 x
and from 2023 a white cb 1100ex, good bike but a lot of vibration after 3000 rpm,

Because all my gear was lost to the fire, I have begun acquiring new stuff along with a fervent commitment to work less and ride more.

I ran across this FAA-Approved Helmet Bag on Amazon:

You are allowed to carry it on Board on a flight as carry-on luggage. The bag has a beautiful felt lining that will not scratch your helmet or face shield. It also has side pockets for gloves, ear plugs, and other riding essentials. It has double stitching, a convenient handle, and is well made. It can collapse down to a nice flat rectangle for storing at home:












I look forward to using my fancy bag to fly to an interesting destination, rent a motorcycle, and experience a great adventure. Have a great week. David

Thank you EmptySea. Your post on the Slimey Crud Run led me to this excellent Peter Egan 'How To' on changing motorcycle oil.

https://magazine.cycleworld.com/article/...oil-change

The forgotten Honda parallel-twin that once defined generations of riders

The other day I took off for my daily ride. About a mile up the road I felt my left front pocket and noticed I didn't have my phone (always keep my phone on the left front pocket). Thought about going back and getting it but decided no biggie, I was just taking one of my normal 45-60 mile loops. As I was riding, I thought if something happened (1) my wife wouldn't know where I was as I have a tracker app in the phone so she knows where to find me if I run off the road, (2) if I broke down, I couldn't call any friends for help and if necessary (3) I couldn't call AAA for a tow back home or to the shop. Not having my phone was suddenly very disconcerting.

Now, I've been riding for 61 years, ridden thru all of the lower 48 states, 2 provinces in Canada and 5 countries in Europe. I've only had a phone maybe the last 10 years, and the tracker app maybe the last 5 or so. I never worried about being able to be found (I did have one of those orange tracker gizmos for a couple years but got tired of paying the yearly fee), or having to make an emergency call.  Now my world revolved around a cell phone.

Anyhow when I got home my wife was in a panic, was sure an Ohio Highway Patrolman was going to be coming down the driveway to tell her that I had been in an accident somewhere...and was given the stern warning not to ever leave without my phone again

My how times have changed.

Here the exterior modifications I made on my CB '13:

- Handlebar - Renthal 755
- Bar ends - Stainless steel CNC made 
- Mirrors - CB600 2004
- Turn lights - CB '14
- Rear grab - CB1100 RS '17 onwards
- Rear suspensions - Ohlins
- Slip on exhaust - Arrow 
- Engine guards - Active
- Tail light - Honda XL '86                

What do you think?