Getting a Old Honda CB400 Back on the Road
A friend of us runs a successful motorcycle repair shop and does general servicing. His bread and butter is servicing anything with two-wheels regardless the engine size. He loves it when non-abused Honda Wave or similar motorcycles come in for their annual services. What he does not live is elderly Japanese four-cylinders coming in with a string of problems, with multiple causes and a big bad dark cloud hanging over parts availability.
Personally we love nursing an ailing old Japanese gem back into good health and loathe working on bland modern big bike commuters, so when our friend had a problematic Honda CB400/4 he asked the customer if he would be happy with hiring some external experts, who were more geared up for errant classics. Of course we never will call ourselves experts regarding an old CB400/4s…
The elderly diminutive Honda four-cylinder had various medical complaints, but the most frustrating was its inability to start and run, making it paramount for us to collect it in one of our pickup trucks. Oddly, I had never ridden an Honda CB400/4 this old and that wasn’t about to change unless we could figure out what was wrong with it.