Honda-SOHC

Manuals all being downloaded right now Thanks Ashimoto ... will do some reading tonight before I break out the spanners. Haynes manuals...love them! Reassembly is the reverse of dismantling...one of the worlds greatest lies

Bryanj .... i'll bear that in mind. If she's a smoker.....that's the first place I will look. The old Zeds I am used to used to have rubber oil seals that would harden with age, and fail. That was a major hassle to fix. I knew there was a reason I never got shot of that old valve spring compressor.....

I plan to take my time and have fun with this old beast. A light cafe racer makeover once she is solid ( well....being US...it comes with silly high bars and a seat a mile thick so those have got to be replaced whatever I do) and I plan to do as much of the work myself as possible.

Whilst I never had one of these myself...my old mate Dave did...blue F2... I had my trusty Z650 street sleeper with a Gpz750 motor, Mark on a GS750 .... those were the days. Before marriage, kids, careers, and all that stuff. Now I'm 50....losing my hair, and gaining type 2 diabetes and creaking joints....but I'm not ready for a pine box just yet! I have also started to understand why the old man spent so much time converting his Thunderbird to look like the one he had when he was 16 ....Newer isn't always better in the ways that count.

Now I'm off to grab a fresh cup of Ovaltine and a coule of Sanatogen to get my day started.

Getting on a bit, tired,overweight, and not as quick as we used to be. Me. Not the bike!

So ifelt it was time to move on from the modern world, which frankly was doing little for me. Too much styling and not enough style with a lot of the modern stuff so I wanted a classic project. What better than a SOHC Honda!

Grew up with the classic 80s inline 4, but had mostly Kawasakis and Suzuki's but the ones I had then are, well,stupidly expensive now. I can't spend 3k on a rotted out Z or the 7K another big Katana seems to fetch. Nope...my initial budget was around £1000.

So I have landed one of the many Hondas heading our way from the US. A 1977 F2 model from a a e in Brighton. Looks ok, has compression, but not enough sparks to go round. Could be wiring..could be coil..

It's not my first restore, and I have always done all my own spannering.  But I am a novice when it comes to these.

My plan of attack is to get it running, and then strip and start from a freshly painted frame. Normally I would swap out the old oil, pop the cam cover and oil the cams. Use a dummy tank, and fire it up after turning it over a few times on the crank nut to listen for nasties and feel for instructions. Then try to get it to fire.

Does this work OK for these and are there other things to check?

Have read about the oil jets...where are they located?