At the young and tender age of 18 I passed my motorcycle test and wanted something bigger and faster. This is not difficult if your steed's a rather puny RXS 100 that needs screwing to do 70mph after being chucked out of an aircraft.
Having answered a few adverts that said excellent condition, must be seen, and then being confronted by dogs for big money, I was a little sceptical about going to see an eight year old CB350S that I spotted in my local rag. When I eventually found the bloke's house I noticed everything about it was absolutely immaculate - including the little Honda that he carefully wheeled out of his garage.
For me, the deal was done as soon as I saw it! But I did have a closer look just to check for any hidden nightmares - all I could see was more evidence of a bloody well looked after bike, including full service history and the original receipt of purchase when the bike was new.
I handed over the asking price of 1000 notes (feeling it an insult to haggle lower) and rode away on my first proper bike. After my little Yamaha, the power blew my mind - 34 horses a lot to an inexperienced novice. As I gained confidence my lack of maturity set in and my brain could be found in my right hand rather than somewhere near my eyes! The complete insanity only lasted for a month...
I was on my way to work one autumn morning, convinced I was Carl Fogarty, when the lights changed up ahead - hard braking and wet leaves don't mix particularly well as it is, but when some bastard in a Ford Fiesta jumps the lights coming the other way, things turn really nasty.
The sight of the cage coming towards me was the most terrifying moment of my short and sheltered life. I literally squealed like a pig, braced myself for some serious pain. The car's tyres scorched on the wet tarmac and the poor Honda slammed straight into it, making the most awful noise that would make even the most hardened biker cry. While all this was happening I was somersaulting through the air, admiring the view and then hitting the floor, taking all the skin off my arse.
The amount of pain I was in suggested that I was still alive but my legs were like jelly with the shock, which immobilised me for a minute or two. When I eventually got up, the cager barely let me pick the bike up before going completely apeshit and saying all sorts of things about insurance and the police. A few poison phone calls followed later but since there were no witnesses nothing ever came of it and the only money I had to fork out was for a broken indicator lens, and had a Saturday morning of stress straightening the yokes. No permanent damage done so I had faith in the bike's robustness.
The CB is a really smart looking bike with its tubular wraparound frame and nicely curved tank, powerful twin front discs and a big fat rear drum, rather interesting four spoke wheels that people seem to laugh at (takes all sorts, I suppose) and a quite sporty riding position that's also comfortable for about sixty miles. Of course, another big bonus are twin shocks that sadly now are all too rare on most bikes. In spite of all its good looks and sophisticated braking system, etc., the engine is nothing more or less than a variant on the Superdream theme.
A pity that, as Superdream engines notoriously go pop at 50,000 miles. As mine had only done 18000 miles when I bought it I wasn't that worried, and after the accident the bike was ridden mildly everywhere it went. It has to be said that the performance is bland, but then with the exception of the RD most 350's do tend to be bland; all needing a good screwing to blast through the ton!
The Honda's lack of acceleration got me done by the police for crossing a white line after failing to overtake a car quickly enough (bastards). The female cop looked just like Anthea Turner, made me feel like a class one criminal. As this was shortly after I'd passed the advanced motorcycle test, I felt even worse. Mind, it just goes to show that you don't need an advanced motorcycle to pass the advanced motorcycle test - much to the surprise of all those boring old blokes on BMW's.
Servicing was simple, oil every 1000 miles and the filter every two thou. Valves every 5000 miles and plugs at 3000 miles. All was well until about 35000 miles when what sounded like the camchain started to give trouble. Honda UK wanted 60-odd quid for a new camchain and to my horror the local rip-off merchant of a dealer told me that the cases would have to be split to replace it. F..k that!
Got a pattern chain from a neat little place I know complete with rivet plate for about twenty notes and got a very clever chap I know to just feed it in off the old one and joined it up. Bob's yer uncle, Fanny's yer aunt.
I could've done the job myself but I can be very clumsy. For example, I was changing the oil one day when I completely shagged the sump's thread and cracked the case! When I finished crying, it was straight into the yellow pages to find an aluminium welder, as a new sump's costly and also a huge job to undertake.
I found someone willing to do the job if I could take the engine to him. I felt close to suicide on finding the front engine bolt seized solid, the bloody thing would not shift for love nor money. No choice but to strip the bike down to the frame and shove it into the back of my brother's Metro.
With the job done it never gave any more trouble and the next few thousand miles were greatly enjoyed as everything was in fine fettle. The original exhaust long gone in favour of a Motad when it fell off - in fact, I haven't seen any of these bikes with their original exhaust, obviously short-lived from new. The one on mine was rotted to buggery, the design a bit slack insofar as it collects a lot of water.
Tyres last well, the back doing an easy ten thou and the front good for almost twice that. A heavy-duty chain and sprocket kit would see out nearly twelve thou. Speaking of which, the chain needed constant adjustment. Buying parts for this bike seems abnormally expensive, something to do with them now being pretty rare on the ground.
At 40,000 miles, the chain driven balancer system started to play up by making a loud rustling noise. After adjusting the chain, situated behind the clutch cover, it quietened down but needed regular attention - a new cover gasket required each time; much to my wallet's dismay.
Done holidays, rallies, commuting, etc - often two-up which doesn't spoil the performance. Survived three winters without much damage. Sold it for eight hundred quid with the only immediate problem a blown fork seal. Should've kept it, had nothing but hassle since despite buying a newer GPZ500S.
Chris Green
****************************************************
I intended to be first among UMG punters with a piece of prose on the Honda CB350SG, the latest reincarnation of the unfairly despised Superdream. However, someone got there first and painted a generally favourable picture. Nevertheless, I still feel my laboriously word processed spiel is worth reading so if you're sitting comfortably....
This bike is certainly not the stuff of which tall motorcycling stories are made but that's natural really - I mean, the bike is reasonably quick and very reliable, so it's not particularly exciting. But hang on, I'm a London rider trained in the art of despatching and urban rat race survival. Motorcycles are my only form of transport. It's usually wet and cold. The roads are falling to bits. This isn't Route 66 but Hanger Lane. The Honda begins to make some sense.
I've done 14000 miles from new so far on the CB. Originally, it was destined for despatching. I bought it because it's a relatively simple machine and thus a candidate for self servicing (after the warranty expires). Also, with such a successful pedigree, the old 400 Superdream was very reliable, I reckoned on it not suffering terminal internal destruction too rapidly - a useful quality in a despatch bike. However, my despatching job came to an end and I decided not to sign up for any more torture. I got a much less frantic occupation instead and the new bike breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The Honda has proved itself to be, as they say, an excellent tool for urban use. For me, at any rate, a bike needs good acceleration and really good brakes to ensure survival in London traffic. Okay, it's pretty slow on the motorway if you regard 70-80mph cruising as slow, but it has a fair bit of grunt for getting out of tight spots on city roads.
I find that if you use the gears then the Honda will really bowl along. The power comes on smoothly and immediately, so you can out accelerate all the cars and quite a few bikes from a standing start. More importantly, the bike is well suited to the type of point-and-squirt riding used when cutting through serious jams. And when that taxi in front does a sudden U-turn, the powerful front brakes are useful. The rear isn't actually much cop, at least it won't lock the back wheel, but the front's are really effective; they've saved my bacon a few times.
On more open roads you soon come up against the limitations of this bike. On the motorway, a cruising speed about 10mph over the limit has to suffice unless you want to cane the engine mercilessly. Compared to an LC350 the power to weight ratio is rather poor; as well as developing only 34hp it has to lug around 380lbs. However, it's certainly no slug, it's just that there's little extra power left once you're in motorway cruising mode. In general, though, I think that the spread of available power up to about 85mph is pretty good.
The engine is basically similar to the 250 and 400 Superdreams and will probably fail in the same way. The Superdreams tended to be reliable until everything was worn out at 40 to 50,000 miles, when they were just beyond salvage. Just about every other modern bike in the known universe, when they have one, drive their balance shafts by gear, note the poor old CB's chain, although it is a little easier to get at the tensioner and seems to need less attention than earlier bikes. The 350, having its pistons going up and down together as per old Brit twins, sounds nice and the balance shaft combined with the lack of capacity and low state of tune means it's as smooth as you could want without totally removing all feel of an engine whirring away.
Obviously, I can only compare the CB350 with my previous mounts. And there stands the most uninspiring list of motorcycles this side of the MZ works. For someone like me who has clocked up thousands of miles on the two wheeled equivalents of the Ford Cortina and Transit, and who has had his fair share of anguish, the CB350 is quite a good bike.
To give it its due, reliability has been first rate with nothing failing to work in 14000 miles. The front brake calipers seized up thanks to all the road crud. As a result I couldn't change the pads and had to get the dealer to apply a flamethrower. As I'm sure you're aware, the Japs don't put nearly enough lubricant on the pins with dire consequences when they are exposed to the ravages of a winter on English roads. The calipers now have a tasteful anodised look, but what an expense. More expense was incurred after the thing was blown over by the wind and a few months later an idiot knocked it over while parked. New bars and mudguard please, an astronomical sum plus the dreaded VAT. Still, at least my bike does its crashing whilst I'm not on it.
In fact, parking is the one aspect of London riding I hate the most. People say it's par for the course round here but it's a frightening experience when you look out of the window and find the bike eating tarmac. It's also occasions like that when you find that you can lift almost 400lbs of metal. When it happened the second time, it encouraged me to dig out my Honda H100 and used that for commuting to work.
I soon found that this device got me around London just as well as the CB, so I'm going to sell the latter whilst it's still in good condition and save up for something interesting to ride at the weekends. The CBs, VTs and GTs of this world are the only things for despatching but those days have gone and so I can't see the point in running that type of bike.
Ironically, I took my test on a Honda H100 eight years ago. After a succession of basic but pretty big bikes, culminating in a wonderful working relationship with a huge company CX500 barge, I'm back on a farty little two stroke.
I P Carter
****************************************************
When every muscle in my body was strained by the contorted riding position, when every ounce of power was extracted from the little vertical twin mill and when there was a strong following wind and downwards descent, then, and only then, would the speedo slowly click up to a 100mph. I found that out within the first hour of ownership and it was to define the very nature of the CB350S.
The whole bike felt very nervous, as if there was not enough rubber to hold the 380lbs in check, but it was weaves rather than wobbles, white-lining rather than trying to throw me out of the seat - the bike lacking, absolutely, any vicious traits. The worn out tyres didn't help but even when later endowed with reasonable rubber top speed excursions were always rather edgy.
80 to 85mph cruising was relatively easy to maintain, without any contortions and precious little vibration or floating about, as if this was the bike's most natural, most settled, speed. Below 50mph in top the engine grumbled away and between 50 and 75mph there was a little residual roughness, confirming that the engine had its roots in the 1978 CB250T Dream (Nightmare in impolite circles) rather than the brash, brave, high tech nineties.
The later CB400N took the Superdream design as far as it was possible, given the constraints of three valve heads, chain driven balancers and poor build quality (as in using the cheapest engine components you can get away with). The CB350S's stab at sporty styling hid a 34hp engine that the UMG quite correctly describes as bland.
But that doesn't mean it isn't fun, does it? Well, yes it probably does, but that doesn't stop some people. Revved until it died, a finale it never quite managed despite a rather desperate feel, the Honda was able to navigate quite ephemerally both through town and along country roads. Partial thanks were given to Koni-Dial-A-Ride shocks but mostly it was down to low weight and, on my own modest part, an excess of madness, being pissed off with work (boredom), enraged at the girlfriend (elephant-like) and furious at England (weather, people, etc), all my angst and horror were taken out on the percolating Honda.
The poor old thing had already suffered three owners, 20,000 miles and three years of scorn and rejection, since its inception in the final year of manufacture, 1989. Faded was its paint, tarnished its alloy and worn out its consumables when I got my prehensile paws upon it for the mere expenditure of 425 sovs. What had sounded like a terminal camchain rattle turned out to be merely normal engine noise but, anyway, proved to be the opening to a good bargaining point and a bit of verbal hustling that would've made Arthur Daley proud.
The only real sign of its worn state, if viewed through a squint with the Walkman turned up high, was an impoverishing thirst for fuel that harked back to the heady days of the Kawasaki Mach 1, though to the Honda's credit wheelies were only possible with a twenty stone orang-utan of a girlfriend out back whilst simultaneously revving to 20 thou and dropping the clutch dead with the sound of exploding bearings and fractured metal. It could probably be fun whilst it lasted (about ten minutes I'd guess) but becoming proficient at picking up hundreds of bits of shattered motorcycle was not something I wanted to add to my CV.
The 25 to 30mpg turned out to be due to an airfilter that was encrusted with the debris from a nuclear holocaust or at the very least riding the bike through the local gravel pit, which might also explain the poor finish. As the filter fell apart in my hands the easiest thing to do was chuck the whole box, which looked like it would need a degree in engineering or bodging to put back together without taking a hacksaw to the carbs. The engine ran rather well in this decapitated state and fuel worked out at 40 to 50mpg. Still lousy for the performance but short of a long stroke British single from the fifties (that woudn't take the neglect) I doubted if any other hack was going to better it.
A modicum of respect endowed upon the CB worked wonders, and a line of chatter on the credulous (if not crapulous) girlfriend that spending every spare moment cleaning, scrubbing and polishing the bike would work wonders for her diet and muscle tone (well, she couldn't eat when covered in Gunk, grime and old engine oil, could she?) eventually gave a shine that would have BMW executives wondering what the heck was Honda's secret ingredient.
Due to crap mudguards, quite terrible weather and a very knackered drive chain that needed oil faster than a BSA Bantam past its prime, said finish was totally obscured within thirty minutes of taking to the road. Ain't it an unfair world and all! Further, the grime found its way into the front calipers with unerring accuracy, leading to biweekly stripdowns and long into the night swearing fits - I always locked the bigger hammers away first because I knew the way it was going to go. I reckon it's deliberate policy on part of the Japs, an attempt at overstraining the NHS's meagre mental wards!
The braking, when it was working, was better than expected, with the option of smoking tyres or gentle retardation. Safe in the wet and wild enough in the dry to save the sides of countless tin cages driven with the usual mad isolation from reality. The front forks were a bit spindly, shook in the yokes when I really hammered the front brake and would've snapped right off if I ever hit anything solid with a velocity greater than a gnat's fart.
The bike was as manoeuvrable as a lightly loaded wheelbarrow and as accurate as a toy tricycle at low speeds, but came together after about 25mph. The former may've been due to mismatched tyres, poor weight distribution or merely myself still suffering from the night before, the girlfriend driving me to drink as well as to riding the Honda as if I was a demented young thug. Given that in a year's abuse I never fell off I can't praise the little jewel of Japanese engineering enough.
Okay, you can put the sick bucket away - at the time I spent most of my spare energy cursing its lack of acceleration and derisory top speed. It was the kind of machine that made you want to stand up on the seat, moon following cagers whilst tossing grenades at pedestrians; do something, anything, to overcome the overwhelming sense of boredom!
As the girlfriend has yet to complete her course as a mechanic, the Honda received as much attention as I'd give to the homeless vagabonds who've chosen to camp out under the nearby railway arch. That is, the odd kick in the guts in passing, just to show who's boss. Alright, I will admit to the occasional oil change with the cheapest recycled oil from the local car accessory store, but I only did that when I ran out of old engine oil to throw at the chain. Carbs, valves and internal chain tensioners (balancer and camchain both) have never been touched by human hand to my knowledge, probably not since the bike left the factory gates. Why bother when the bugger keeps on running?
When I came to sell the rotten heap after a year there was 38000 miles on the clock. Its advance state of neglect was disguised by a week's worth of polishing from the girlfriend's muscular mitts and syrupy gearbox oil in the engine sump. Bounder, do I hear you cry? Don't panic, it was down to the local dealer, a Walter Mitty type who thinks he's a hero rather than an arsehole.
He whined for a while, sent his mechanic out on the bike to see if he could crash or break it, and failing that happy end, offered me 400 notes. I almost took the money and ran but shouted loudly at him that it was worth twice that, at the very least. We settled on eleven used fifties, so grime encrusted they looked like they came straight out of the back pocket of a miner. He must've wondered what he'd done wrong when I sauntered away, whistling merrily. I bought MCN the next day and ended up with another CB350S with a mere 9000 miles on the clock.
And that tells you all you need to know. As motorcycles go it doesn't excel at all but if you need something reasonable that will run for 20,000 miles with hardly any attention then the CB350S has the goods but don't, whatever you do, bother with high mileage examples!
Jack Lyndon
****************************************************
I intended to be first among UMG punters with a piece of prose on the Honda CB350SG, the latest reincarnation of the unfairly despised Superdream. However, someone got there first and painted a generally favourable picture. Nevertheless, I still feel my laboriously word processed spiel is worth reading so if you're sitting comfortably....
This bike is certainly not the stuff of which tall motorcycling stories are made but that's natural really - I mean, the bike is reasonably quick and very reliable, so it's not particularly exciting. But hang on, I'm a London rider trained in the art of despatching and urban rat race survival. Motorcycles are my only form of transport. It's usually wet and cold. The roads are falling to bits. This isn't Route 66 but Hanger Lane. The Honda begins to make some sense.
I've done 14000 miles from new so far on the CB. Originally, it was destined for despatching. I bought it because it's a relatively simple machine and thus a candidate for self servicing (after the warranty expires). Also, with such a successful pedigree, the old 400 Superdream was very reliable, I reckoned on it not suffering terminal internal destruction too rapidly - a useful quality in a despatch bike. However, my despatching job came to an end and I decided not to sign up for any more torture. I got a much less frantic occupation instead and the new bike breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The Honda has proved itself to be, as they say, an excellent tool for urban use. For me, at any rate, a bike needs good acceleration and really good brakes to ensure survival in London traffic. Okay, it's pretty slow on the motorway if you regard 70-80mph cruising as slow, but it has a fair bit of grunt for getting out of tight spots on city roads.
I find that if you use the gears then the Honda will really bowl along. The power comes on smoothly and immediately, so you can out accelerate all the cars and quite a few bikes from a standing start. More importantly, the bike is well suited to the type of point-and-squirt riding used when cutting through serious jams. And when that taxi in front does a sudden U-turn, the powerful front brakes are useful. The rear isn't actually much cop, at least it won't lock the back wheel, but the front's are really effective; they've saved my bacon a few times.
On more open roads you soon come up against the limitations of this bike. On the motorway, a cruising speed about 10mph over the limit has to suffice unless you want to cane the engine mercilessly. Compared to an LC350 the power to weight ratio is rather poor; as well as developing only 34hp it has to lug around 380lbs. However, it's certainly no slug, it's just that there's little extra power left once you're in motorway cruising mode. In general, though, I think that the spread of available power up to about 85mph is pretty good.
The engine is basically similar to the 250 and 400 Superdreams and will probably fail in the same way. The Superdreams tended to be reliable until everything was worn out at 40 to 50,000 miles, when they were just beyond salvage. Just about every other modern bike in the known universe, when they have one, drive their balance shafts by gear, note the poor old CB's chain, although it is a little easier to get at the tensioner and seems to need less attention than earlier bikes. The 350, having its pistons going up and down together as per old Brit twins, sounds nice and the balance shaft combined with the lack of capacity and low state of tune means it's as smooth as you could want without totally removing all feel of an engine whirring away.
Obviously, I can only compare the CB350 with my previous mounts. And there stands the most uninspiring list of motorcycles this side of the MZ works. For someone like me who has clocked up thousands of miles on the two wheeled equivalents of the Ford Cortina and Transit, and who has had his fair share of anguish, the CB350 is quite a good bike.
To give it its due, reliability has been first rate with nothing failing to work in 14000 miles. The front brake calipers seized up thanks to all the road crud. As a result I couldn't change the pads and had to get the dealer to apply a flamethrower. As I'm sure you're aware, the Japs don't put nearly enough lubricant on the pins with dire consequences when they are exposed to the ravages of a winter on English roads. The calipers now have a tasteful anodised look, but what an expense. More expense was incurred after the thing was blown over by the wind and a few months later an idiot knocked it over while parked. New bars and mudguard please, an astronomical sum plus the dreaded VAT. Still, at least my bike does its crashing whilst I'm not on it.
In fact, parking is the one aspect of London riding I hate the most. People say it's par for the course round here but it's a frightening experience when you look out of the window and find the bike eating tarmac. It's also occasions like that when you find that you can lift almost 400lbs of metal. When it happened the second time, it encouraged me to dig out my Honda H100 and used that for commuting to work.
I soon found that this device got me around London just as well as the CB, so I'm going to sell the latter whilst it's still in good condition and save up for something interesting to ride at the weekends. The CBs, VTs and GTs of this world are the only things for despatching but those days have gone and so I can't see the point in running that type of bike.
Ironically, I took my test on a Honda H100 eight years ago. After a succession of basic but pretty big bikes, culminating in a wonderful working relationship with a huge company CX500 barge, I'm back on a farty little two stroke.
I P Carter
****************************************************
When every muscle in my body was strained by the contorted riding position, when every ounce of power was extracted from the little vertical twin mill and when there was a strong following wind and downwards descent, then, and only then, would the speedo slowly click up to a 100mph. I found that out within the first hour of ownership and it was to define the very nature of the CB350S.
The whole bike felt very nervous, as if there was not enough rubber to hold the 380lbs in check, but it was weaves rather than wobbles, white-lining rather than trying to throw me out of the seat - the bike lacking, absolutely, any vicious traits. The worn out tyres didn't help but even when later endowed with reasonable rubber top speed excursions were always rather edgy.
80 to 85mph cruising was relatively easy to maintain, without any contortions and precious little vibration or floating about, as if this was the bike's most natural, most settled, speed. Below 50mph in top the engine grumbled away and between 50 and 75mph there was a little residual roughness, confirming that the engine had its roots in the 1978 CB250T Dream (Nightmare in impolite circles) rather than the brash, brave, high tech nineties.
The later CB400N took the Superdream design as far as it was possible, given the constraints of three valve heads, chain driven balancers and poor build quality (as in using the cheapest engine components you can get away with). The CB350S's stab at sporty styling hid a 34hp engine that the UMG quite correctly describes as bland.
But that doesn't mean it isn't fun, does it? Well, yes it probably does, but that doesn't stop some people. Revved until it died, a finale it never quite managed despite a rather desperate feel, the Honda was able to navigate quite ephemerally both through town and along country roads. Partial thanks were given to Koni-Dial-A-Ride shocks but mostly it was down to low weight and, on my own modest part, an excess of madness, being pissed off with work (boredom), enraged at the girlfriend (elephant-like) and furious at England (weather, people, etc), all my angst and horror were taken out on the percolating Honda.
The poor old thing had already suffered three owners, 20,000 miles and three years of scorn and rejection, since its inception in the final year of manufacture, 1989. Faded was its paint, tarnished its alloy and worn out its consumables when I got my prehensile paws upon it for the mere expenditure of 425 sovs. What had sounded like a terminal camchain rattle turned out to be merely normal engine noise but, anyway, proved to be the opening to a good bargaining point and a bit of verbal hustling that would've made Arthur Daley proud.
The only real sign of its worn state, if viewed through a squint with the Walkman turned up high, was an impoverishing thirst for fuel that harked back to the heady days of the Kawasaki Mach 1, though to the Honda's credit wheelies were only possible with a twenty stone orang-utan of a girlfriend out back whilst simultaneously revving to 20 thou and dropping the clutch dead with the sound of exploding bearings and fractured metal. It could probably be fun whilst it lasted (about ten minutes I'd guess) but becoming proficient at picking up hundreds of bits of shattered motorcycle was not something I wanted to add to my CV.
The 25 to 30mpg turned out to be due to an airfilter that was encrusted with the debris from a nuclear holocaust or at the very least riding the bike through the local gravel pit, which might also explain the poor finish. As the filter fell apart in my hands the easiest thing to do was chuck the whole box, which looked like it would need a degree in engineering or bodging to put back together without taking a hacksaw to the carbs. The engine ran rather well in this decapitated state and fuel worked out at 40 to 50mpg. Still lousy for the performance but short of a long stroke British single from the fifties (that woudn't take the neglect) I doubted if any other hack was going to better it.
A modicum of respect endowed upon the CB worked wonders, and a line of chatter on the credulous (if not crapulous) girlfriend that spending every spare moment cleaning, scrubbing and polishing the bike would work wonders for her diet and muscle tone (well, she couldn't eat when covered in Gunk, grime and old engine oil, could she?) eventually gave a shine that would have BMW executives wondering what the heck was Honda's secret ingredient.
Due to crap mudguards, quite terrible weather and a very knackered drive chain that needed oil faster than a BSA Bantam past its prime, said finish was totally obscured within thirty minutes of taking to the road. Ain't it an unfair world and all! Further, the grime found its way into the front calipers with unerring accuracy, leading to biweekly stripdowns and long into the night swearing fits - I always locked the bigger hammers away first because I knew the way it was going to go. I reckon it's deliberate policy on part of the Japs, an attempt at overstraining the NHS's meagre mental wards!
The braking, when it was working, was better than expected, with the option of smoking tyres or gentle retardation. Safe in the wet and wild enough in the dry to save the sides of countless tin cages driven with the usual mad isolation from reality. The front forks were a bit spindly, shook in the yokes when I really hammered the front brake and would've snapped right off if I ever hit anything solid with a velocity greater than a gnat's fart.
The bike was as manoeuvrable as a lightly loaded wheelbarrow and as accurate as a toy tricycle at low speeds, but came together after about 25mph. The former may've been due to mismatched tyres, poor weight distribution or merely myself still suffering from the night before, the girlfriend driving me to drink as well as to riding the Honda as if I was a demented young thug. Given that in a year's abuse I never fell off I can't praise the little jewel of Japanese engineering enough.
Okay, you can put the sick bucket away - at the time I spent most of my spare energy cursing its lack of acceleration and derisory top speed. It was the kind of machine that made you want to stand up on the seat, moon following cagers whilst tossing grenades at pedestrians; do something, anything, to overcome the overwhelming sense of boredom!
As the girlfriend has yet to complete her course as a mechanic, the Honda received as much attention as I'd give to the homeless vagabonds who've chosen to camp out under the nearby railway arch. That is, the odd kick in the guts in passing, just to show who's boss. Alright, I will admit to the occasional oil change with the cheapest recycled oil from the local car accessory store, but I only did that when I ran out of old engine oil to throw at the chain. Carbs, valves and internal chain tensioners (balancer and camchain both) have never been touched by human hand to my knowledge, probably not since the bike left the factory gates. Why bother when the bugger keeps on running?
When I came to sell the rotten heap after a year there was 38000 miles on the clock. Its advance state of neglect was disguised by a week's worth of polishing from the girlfriend's muscular mitts and syrupy gearbox oil in the engine sump. Bounder, do I hear you cry? Don't panic, it was down to the local dealer, a Walter Mitty type who thinks he's a hero rather than an arsehole.
He whined for a while, sent his mechanic out on the bike to see if he could crash or break it, and failing that happy end, offered me 400 notes. I almost took the money and ran but shouted loudly at him that it was worth twice that, at the very least. We settled on eleven used fifties, so grime encrusted they looked like they came straight out of the back pocket of a miner. He must've wondered what he'd done wrong when I sauntered away, whistling merrily. I bought MCN the next day and ended up with another CB350S with a mere 9000 miles on the clock.
And that tells you all you need to know. As motorcycles go it doesn't excel at all but if you need something reasonable that will run for 20,000 miles with hardly any attention then the CB350S has the goods but don't, whatever you do, bother with high mileage examples!
Jack Lyndon