First Ride

[Ulvetanna_imp]

My brakes, front and rear, are excellent. I did find a pinched throttle cable when I pulled the bike apart to check the valve clearances. I corrected this, as it was causing a cable drag issue when the bars were turned full left lock after doing the Chip Beck hand prop, er, handlebar modification. No more drag.

This rear brake thing is a real mystery to me. Brakes are simple system. If it needs bleeding it would feel mushy, not excessively firm.

Maybe some folks are jumping to conclusions about the brake. The bike has a long wheelbase and is fairly heavy, and the brake needs to wear in. Sometimes brakes take thousands of miles to really seat-in and work optimally, especially with street pads and rotors, but this sounds more like a situation where the new owner is just not used to what he's got in the new bike.

I say this because here again, many CB1100 owners are probably more used to using a lot of rear brake and not so much front, and it feels weak.

I saw a thread that also complained that the front brakes were too powerful, which tends to support that conclusion.

Yesterday I rode 55 miles of fast, deserted twisting road, and found numerous opportunities to explore the limits of both brakes, practicing bringing the front to near-lockup (tire is howling nicely, not quite squealing) and using both brakes together. These brakes are just outright superb, I wouldn't change anything about them.

Something to keep in mind when evaluating the bike is that it is in fact a sportbike and is listed as such on Honda's website. It might look like old technology, but au contraire, it is not a relic. Those brakes were lifted from the CBR1000RR of the earlier generation.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not have ABS.