Some shots from a cruise out to SlyFox Brewery that me, Ed, Ricky, Dana, and Andrew hit up a few weeks ago. Real fun, twisty route that we should hit up when it gets nice again!

So… after taking the engine apart it was apparent that we couldn’t diagnose the cylinder head properly. The cb450 in the 70′s has a really weird cylinder head design. Instead of having valve springs, it has what are called “torsion bars” which hit the valve to open it, and also, hit the valve to shut it. Really weird…

Also, each piston has 3 rings on it… bottom is oil ring, and top  2 are compression rings. So… the middle ring on each piston was “stuck”. Meaning that it didn’t have any free play in it.

So… I took the cylinder head to a specialty engine machine shop here in the N.E. philly, and explained the rings. They told me that a ring should never be stuck like that, and that’s why oil is burning. Also, they told me not to fuck with the cylinder head. So, I took their advice, didn’t fuck with the head. Ordered new OEM pistons and rings.

We re-assembled the engine on a tuesday night. Then put the engine back into the frame on saturday.

After several kicks, it fired right up and runs awesome. No more smoking. Did the timing and points. Rode it around fairmount park for a bit on sunday. It runs awesome!!!

I’m psyched. Successfully did our first real engine work.

I really liked my bike at this stage, it was reliable and ran strong. This made riding all summer awesome. However, It’s currently undergoing surgery in my basement right now and should emerge even better come springtime. yea boi.

cb200′s with clubmans are badass.

So… my brother-in-law bought a cb450 the summer of 2008. It didn’t have a title, but it ran decent.

To make a long story short, after several months, the engine started having some issues. He got frustrated with not being able to ride it, combined with not being able to get a title, so he said fuck-it, and gave it to me, and then went out and bought a newer Ducati monster.

So, now I have 2 cycles:
- 1979 cb650
- 1973 cb450

I ended up being able to get the title for it!!! (long story), so now my friends and I decided to open up the engine and figure out what’s wrong with it.

After doing some riding tests, we found that the bike ran pretty fuckin good, but it smoked super bad out of the left side. So… we did some compression tests and found that each side was well within spec. I naturally assumed that if oil was getting in the combustion chamber, but the compression tests were good, that a valve seal was leaking oil.

So took the engine out of the frame and opened the engine up…