HONDA CB 500 F

Honda CB 500 Four
A real “basket-case” in every sense of the word!
This machine was owned by an expatriate chap in Ghana during the early ’70’s.
Unfortunately he got involved in an accident one afternoon and ended up losing one arm as a result of it, getting caught on the rear bumper of a van coming in the opposite direction.
as I heard the story many years later, he was overtaking the vehicle ahead of him right at an intersection, going uphill!
Ugh! I still feel for him to this day.
The bike got hooked in the bumper as well and got dragged along for a brief instant, suffering quite a bit of physical damage as well, parts of which ended up with one of the local motorcycle repair shops, where the repairman just dismantled the whole bike with the idea of selling it in parts.
(I believe because of the badly broken/damaged engine cases.)
Unfortunately for him - and this is how and why this machine ended up with my big brothers - was the fact that there was no other CB 500 in the whole country and obviously no demand whatsoever for the parts.
So this bike sat in boxes in his shack for a considerable amount of time, all through which he held out for maximum gain as my brothers tried to buy “all the boxes” from him.
Finally one day, after what seemed like an eternity to me - because for so long I had heard we would be getting a “new bike”, a new 4-cylinder bike, the boxes arrived.
Restoration of the bike began on the verandah of our big brother’s apartment, but only sporadically at night after the end of his normal working day - which mean’t not consistently every night.
At this age, I was still the helper/“go-fer” - go for this, go for that, hand me this, hand me that … but through which I continued to learn so much more about practical engineering/mechanics.
I would stay up with my brothers through every working session till the wee hours of the night, go to school the next day and dream of what next we would accomplish the night to come.
Losing sleep was immaterial!
There was so much to learn and do.
It was a small price to pay for so much gain!
The gain of getting to ride a whopping 4-cylinder machine if and only if it could be brought back to life, only because there were no replacement parts obtainable for it.
It was what it was!
So, the main problem was the fact that the engine case on the contact breaker point side, the side responsible for ignition for the engine was broken.
There was physically nothing to mount the breaker-points to.
So the ingenuity of life under “third-world country conditions” proved how resourceful and smart people in that part of the world actually are!
Long story short, my brothers literally rebuilt the broken case with some nifty aluminum welding and needed epoxy work, to establish a well functioning mount for the contact breaker-points’ mounting plate.
So additionally, the whole bike had to be put back together again - without any manuals, diagrams, schematics or factory literature guidance!
I remember vividly my job was to insert and remove bolts and nuts when determining the correct locations and fitting for each.
This took quite a considerable amount of time, but eventually we got it all figured out!
The day came, not soon enough, when we fired it up.
What a sweet sounding engine.
It was like nothing we had ever owned before.
We now had a “new bike” in our family
… and what a big one it was!
I remember days when I was allowed to ride it alone, not as a pillion passenger.
Pure joy.
Pure power.
Smooth, silky and torquey!
It was a real pleasure to ride.
The one thing I remember clearly was that it was prone to ignition issues from faulty high tension wires and this caused sometimes problematic roughness of the engine operation.
But when it ran well, it was second to none.
I can’t tell you all the specs of this bike, plus there was no other machine we had to even compare it to.
Being the first 4-cylinder machine in my life all I remember is that it had an electric starter, lots of power and was a thrilling ride.
A ride like no other before it, in our family.
All I did was cherish each ride on it due to the pride derived from the hard work we had all put into it.
We named it “Boxer”.
I think that was because it came to us in boxes!