Back At It

Well, here we go again! In between this bike - a 1985 Honda CB650SC that was given to me by my stepson - and the 1978 Kawasaki KZ650B I wrote about, I had a 1972 Honda CB350 Four briefly up on the slab there, but found it has low compression and dirty carbs, which is going to take more time and money than this old man has right now; so I put that one back in the shed and turned my attention to this one.

I'd been wanting to work on this old Honda anyway - after years of working on Seventies Hondas and adding a 1989 Honda VTR 250 to the stable kind of as an 'odd man out', I've developed an appreciation for more modern bikes. 

I used to have an old 1968 Puch 250 SGS I put back on the road - 

1968 Puch SGS 250

A neat little bike, it's a two-stroke rolling piece of history that caught my eye at one time; but like every bike out there it has its foibles - see that round, star-shaped thing on the engine...? Yah, that's the choke - very rare and very expensive when you do find one. And you can't see them here, but it has two different 'tanks' inside that gas tank, one for gas and the other for two-stroke oil. The ride also left something to be desired, as inside that seat are nothing but springs attached to a frame...so Yes, while it's a cool little bike - and does have its fans! - I eventually sold it and a parts bike I had because I wasn't really riding it. It actually ran really well - this pic was taken after I had refurbished it, I left it looking rather shabby because I liked the patina.

So anyway - yesterday I finally got around to getting this CB650SC up on the table but was having a helluva time figuring out the solenoid and battery cables, and what went where. Never having a bike before that used a fused solenoid, it took me a while with some guys on a 650 website to discover that I was missing a cable that goes from the Positive lug on the battery to the solenoid.   

In this pic, the starter cable has the dotted red lines, the black dots are the cable for the Negative/ground post on the battery and that male connector up behind the starter cable goes into the blue & green fused solenoid. And this is where I got confused - There should have been another cable going from the battery Positive post to the solenoid, but I couldn't see one... (never mind the yellow arrow pointing to the solenoid post from the Ground cable - that's where I thought it went, but I was mistaken. That cable goes to the battery Negative post). 

This pic was sent to me by Bob King, a contributor to the CB650 group on Facebook, who managed to set me straight - you can see how convoluted all the cables are. 

I had previously thought that there was a wire missing that went from the battery Positive to the solenoid, and Bob confirmed that suspicion for me - 'A picture is worth a thousand words', so Thanks Bob! (Bob says that other fuse coming off the Positive battery connection is for a battery charger).