What’s in the Shop

I’ve got a few things in the shop currently in various states of chaos…we’ll talk briefly about the big stuff here. If you’re interested in updates, head over to the Project Updates page.

The first bike up is my 1978 Honda GL1000 Goldwing.. This was my first project bike, which I purchased in late 2016. I had been kicking around the idea of a bike project for awhile, and knew I wanted something physically large, but also 1970s vintage. I had seen some photos of custom GL1000s, so that was what I decided on.

I bought the bike in Stone Mountain, GA, about 2 hours south of Franklin. The Craigslist ad was pretty vague, but showed a relatively complete bike with some questionable modifications. Lots of gold spray paint, the bike had been lowered, weird headlight, etc. Below is a photo of the bike on the trailer headed home.

A few months of work, and I cranked it up for the first time in January of 2017. It’s been on the road pretty much constantly since that time, racking up almost 30k miles since then. It’s a surprisingly capable machine. Not the fastest bike in the world or anything, but it handles better than it has a right to, and will keep up with some unsuspecting sportbikes if ridden well. Below is a photo of it after the rebuild, and how it is today.

Next up is my 1979 Kawasaki KZ1300. This bike has been on my bucket list for awhile, but the ones I was finding were either too expensive or too far gone to be a project candidate. The bike below has sort of an interesting story…I learned about it through sort of six degrees of Facebook…I got a notification that a comment I posted months previously had been replied to, and when I checked, it was someone else asking how much a KZ1300, titled and running, would be worth. I took that to mean that the person had one for sale, so I messaged them. It turns out that this bike was purchased brand new in 1980 as a dealer leftover in Charlotte, NC. The man who owned it lived in Landis, NC, and it appears that it was ridden until about 1991, and then parked.

The guy I bought it from had purchased it from the estate sale after the original owner passed away. It was remarkably well taken care of in storage…the wiring harness was supple and hadn’t been cut up or modified, the bike was all complete save for a missing airbox, and the paint and bodywork were spectacular.

All it took to get running was a carburetor cleaning, rebuilding the front master cylinder and bleeding the front and rear brakes, and a new battery. After a few seconds of cranking, it fired right up and has run very well since being returned to the road.