Honda CT70 Rebuild

At the beginning of the winter we picked up a couple of bikes for projects.  Wes with the Chinese clone of the Ural clone of the BMW, and he also found me a Honda Trail 70 for a sweet ass pit bike.

It arrived not running and in pretty rough shape. We went through the stator, wiring harnesses, coil, etc before I finally decided to do something different. The more I looked at the bike, the rougher it looked, and well, we just don’t live with that around here 🙂 So new plan: Restore the bike to a much nicer condition. At first I planned to completely restore it to original spec, but then realized that well, there are about a million trail 70’s out there, and everyone is restoring them to the factory paint jobs, chrome bits and pieces, etc. That just wasn’t going to work……

First thing to do was to rip the old engine out. 70cc’s isn’t going to cut it. A new Lifan 125cc semi auto 4 speed engine is en route. 55mph on a trail 70? Yes please.

And the paint and condition of the chrome was bugging the heck out of me. So I started stripping it down. And the more I took apart, the bigger the parts list got. Luckily, everything is available either original or reproduction…..I mean everything….and it is all relatively cheap. At home enjoying the 60 degree weather on a Sunday, making a pile of parts.

Taking apart the front forks for paint.

The tree bearings are old roller ball bearings….these are going to be replaced with standard roller wheel bearings when I go back together.

And continuing to strip down the frame. I have never taken a bike apart before…actually never worked on a bike before, but I have watched enough American Chopper to know how to put all this back together 😉

And disassembled. I ordered a new headlight bucket as it was beat up beyond fixing, so once that gets here, everything will go off to paint. The bike will be painted to match my orange Jagermeister car. It will look original with the Honda factory stickers, just orange 🙂

All these little bits and pieces will be replaced, such as the brake light wiring and spring. Grommets, screws, springs, brake/throttle cables, wheel bearings etc.

I think the wheels will be painted silver.

And a bunch of chrome ready for blasting. Once blasted, all the chrome pieces will be powdercoated satin black.

More from the Blog

2 Comments

Leave a comment
cheryl

March 10, 2014 at 11:34 AM

Awesome!! We will be watching this unfold for sure 🙂

Rich

March 25, 2014 at 7:04 PM

Never worked on a bike before? What do you call wrenching on my SV?????

Leave a Reply to Rich Cancel reply