Honda CA77 - My Dream Project - This may be a first

No matter what it is I always like to start my project threads with a little background.
After all a smart person once said "you won't know where you're going unless you know where you've been".

A coworker had this bike for sometime and, due to a move across the country, decided to sell it.
However at the time I had neither the space nor the desire to own such a bike.

So, another coworker bought the bike and began the reassembly.
He assembled about 90% of the bike and attempted to get it running.
The bike would turn over but would not fire.
Having grown tired of hunting for parts for the old beast he decided he wanted to it out of his garage. (possibly scrapping it)
As a fan of all things old and weired and having just moved to a place with some more space i figured I would snatch it up.
Even if it did just set around until I got rid of it, I figured I could at least save it from the scrap heap.

So $50 later it was at my house.

It is a 67 CA77 (AKA 305 dream) and it has 16342 miles on it.

Needless to say it was not much to look at so in the storage pile it went.

This brings us to today.
I do have another bike project but it is a far more technical long term type of project.
I am getting tired of not riding.
So, since this is my most complete bike and closest to actually running, I figured I would use some of my parts lying around the garage and a little fab work to slap me together a ride for the late summer and into the fall riding season.

To be quite honest the lines of this bike do not suit my tastes at all.
This left me with little choice but to cut it up a little in an attempt to turn it into something a little more appealing.

Some of the fans of this bike, if there are any, may want to punch me in the face once they see what I am going to do but.... Actually I don't really have anything to say. I suppose, avert your gaze now.

I am going to work as quickly as money will allow but this will by no means be a project that is finished in two weeks.
Hell it may take me two months or even two years if my long term project addiction gets the better of me.

Ok, enough rambling.
As the saying goes "You have to break an egg to make an omelet" so lets get to the egg breaking stage.
I refer to none other than disassembly.


Actually this it after nearly totally dismantling the bike and putting some of it back together for mock up purposes.

I got the engine up on the bench to see if I can rig up enough wiring an fuel system to make it run.

other than that all I plan to do is clean the engine up and paint it.
There will be no fancy rebuilds at this stage of the game.

So what are my plans you might ask.
Well to be brutally honest I don't know.
This is one of the first projects I have ever done on a whim.
There is almost literally no pre-planning.
I thought "hey I probably got enough parts laying around to turn this into something cool so why not give it a shot"

All I know is that it will be primarily bobber themed.
However my girlfriend would shoot me in the face it I built a bike that did not have a place for her to ride with me.
So I will have to get creative.

Anyway after a few hours of searching I am unable to find even a mildly "custom" build of this bike.
I am fairly certain there are no bobber versions out there so maybe this is a first.
Stay tuned to find out.

Until Next time.

Whoa that thing is wicked! That isn't something you see every day.

I have now passed the point of no return.

Honestly this does not scare me too much.
I have been here before and to be brutally honest this bike meant very little to me in it's original state.

I whacked the back half off of the bike to get a better idea for what I was going to do.

Dollars invested so far $50. (purchase price of the bike)
I think I will keep a running toll of the cost of this machine as it is suppose to be something I slapped together with left over parts so I could build a bike on the cheap.

I then removed this little bracket so I can move it to the opposite side of the sheet metal I removed it from for a new purpose.


What is that new purpose.
Well to serve as a shock mount of course.


The shock is a now unused piece from an old GS750, my other bike project,and I may not even use it but for budget tracking's sake lets say it would fetch 15 bucks somewhere.
Total cost so far $65.

Then after I make a hole in this piece for the shock to pass and do a little grinding to shape I will weld it in place to give me a nice solid mounting point for my seat.

Steel piece $6.25
Running total $71.25

I will be stretching the swing arm a bit to give me a little more room to drop the seat down.
After the stretch I will add some bracing and obviously add a shock mount.

Once the arm is in place I may take a look at the front end again to see if I can drop it a bit to make it look proper.

Thats all for now...

This shall be interesting.

If you look hard enough you will find customized ones in Japan. Though I don't recall anyone making a chopper out of one.

I've never seen a modified dream. I really like the direction it's going in. Keep up the pics.

Wow! I would have bought that thing for the tank and motor and let the rest of it rot. Now I'm thinking this is gonna look amazing.

Nice eye with the frame! I don't think I would have seen that potential but now it looks like you are headed in sweet direction. Keep sharing!

Did a little more today.
I want to get the rear suspension done so I can work on the back half of the frame and the seat and seat mount.

This meant I needed to tackle the swing arm extension.

So, I took this silly looking thing and chopped it up like so.




Then I spent the day welding it all back together with 5 inches added in.

Given the fact that it is a bunch of stamped pieces, adding 5 inches and fitting it all back together was not an easy task.

It will need a little body filler to really smooth it all out but I will do that after I add my new shock mount and supports.

I have these brake parts lying around that I thought about using if I can make them fit but I am not sure.

I could leave the rear drum and put both of these on the front or put one on the front and one on the rear or do both up front and use some older rear disk stuff that I have for the rear.

I am just gonna wing it and see what looks good.

K thats all for now
Until next time...

very interested to see where this goes.

Holy crap this is wacky build, very interested

Weird...

I dig it though! Keep the updates coming!

Well it isn't pretty yet but I am heading in the right direction.

I made some brackets to mount the shock up in the frame.

I now have all the mounts tacked in place and the shock loosely bolted.
I have to add some tubular supports before it can really support any weight.
I will also be adding some more structure inside the frame because the metal is a little thin for that kind of stress.




I can tell you that I put some weight on it and I think I may have to track down another shock because I don't believe the spring on this one is stiff enough.

Another thing I noticed in the last pic is that I have this super wide swingarm and a stupid narrow tire.
I planned to put a wider tire in there but my 2.5 inch rear wheel limits that greatly.
Whats the widest tire I can mount on a 2.5 rear?
It's a 16 by the way.

Not real sure what I am going to do about it because I do not want to buy any wheels unless I can find them real cheap.
This is a budget build after all.

I will do a little hunting to see what I can come up with but in the mean time I will try to get the swing arm shock mount supports fabbed up and welded in.

Until next time...

I like this.....

There's a chart on Avon's (?) site that has a chart with wheel / tire sizes.

Well I think I solved most of the problems I bished about in my last post.

First off I found a decent sized rear tire for my lame rear wheel.
I can run a 130/80/16 rear tire on a 2.5 inch wheel.
I think I can live with that so one problem down and on to the next one.
I needed a cheap rear shock that is stiffer that the gs750 shock I had on there.
It dawned on me that I have two of those rear shocks so why not mount them both in an over/under arrangement.

This is what I did.



You may also notice I did a little more reinforcing on the swing arm as well.

I don't remember what my running total was last time but we may as well add another $15 for the second shock.
I am not going to include the tube I used on the swing arm because it is simply chunks of handlebar I scavenged from a free KZ400 setting in pieces all over my garage.

I still need to add some more bracing inside the frame for both my shock mounts but it is stiff enough now that I could put all my weight on it and it seems to work pretty well.

My new frame end shock mounts will interfere with my air filter but I had plans to add a bend in the intake so the carb and filter stick out the side of the bike anyway so it will all be good.

I will do some finish welding on the swingarm and shock mounts later but for now I am going to work on rebuilding the back half of the frame so i can build and mount a seat.

Until then...

Just a thought. There is no possible way that the piece of olatstock you have the shocks mouted to will survive. Im talking catastrophic failure. I cant tell from what you said whether or not you're going to actually reinforce that, but if you dont I guarentee bad things will happen. Sorry to be a downer man.

VonYinzer said:

Just a thought. There is no possible way that the piece of olatstock you have the shocks mouted to will survive. Im talking catastrophic failure. I cant tell from what you said whether or not you're going to actually reinforce that, but if you dont I guarentee bad things will happen. Sorry to be a downer man.

Click to expand...

I have to agree. There's all kinds of things going on here that I can't possibly comment on as far as functionality goes. I have a great many concerns, and realize that whatever I say can be taken with a grain of salt and can be heeded or not heeded. It's your bike, and you can build it how you want. I have to say that it does look damn cool.

There are many many many factors that go into shock geometry and what makes them work properly. Your talking everything from spring rate to whether or not they are progressive or regressive in the arc of their movement. They produce hundreds if not thousands of pounds of pressure when they react with the bumps and curves going down the road. The single shocks were never meant for the angles and the loads on a vertical plane that you have them mounted at. Don't let me deter you at all man, I just want you to be safe. I'd be glad to help you any way I can. Carry on.

VonYinzer said:

Just a thought. There is no possible way that the piece of olatstock you have the shocks mouted to will survive. Im talking catastrophic failure. I cant tell from what you said whether or not you're going to actually reinforce that, but if you dont I guarentee bad things will happen. Sorry to be a downer man.

Click to expand...

Oh yes there will be tons more reinforcements.
I just wanted to get it to the point that it will support its own weight so I can work on the rear part of the frame.

There will be a couple more tubular supports in there as well as some gussets at several joints.
The flat stock was only meant to be a locator. The tubular sections will be the load bearing structure.

As to Kanticoy's concerns, the only difference between how the shocks are loaded now compared to a standard on-the-swingarm type arrangement is that the shocks are laying down which they were never designed to do.

Could this be a problem? Sure. Will it effect dampening? most certainly. At which point I will get a proper shock and rebuild my mounts for it.

Honestly I never expected it to work that great in the first place.
I just wanted a little suspension and was not too concerned about the dampening
The stock dream shocks were trashed and these shocks are also more than likely at the end of their life cycle.
I would be willing to bet that some people are riding on shocks in the normal arrangement that ride a lot worse than this will.

This will have to function a little better than a hard tail and I never expected it to handle or ride that great.

It is a wicked cheap project after all.

However please do not hesitate to voice your concerns as I am by no means an expert bike builder.

Well we have been at this spot before, maybe Basement Rat can throw in his experiences, lol. Building a mono setup as you are doing, be it with one or two shock is something that must me calculated to the T. If not you will end up with a bike that is not ridable. Kanticoy really knows what he is talking about with mono setups, and there are a few others on her that do to. That being said, there are even more who have attempted and failed.

I am in no way discouraging this build, in fact I want to see it happen if for nothing else than for this Dream to not die in vain. With that said, your first order of business should be to find a shock do your geometry homework, and build your mounts around it. I know Kiley (kanticoy) can help you in getting the geometry right, and choosing the correct shock.

I hope this works and is safe as that is my real concern.

cheers,
Micah

glad you're bracing it, and while these guys all have valid points, i just don't want you to get put off - i wanna see how this turns out, even if it's completely non-functional.

ca77 was never meant to be hacked in my opinion... just too few remaining in good condition to be hacked.

is it cool and original? yes. do i like it? yes.

can i stand to look at this thread? no. when i saw that hack a little piece of me died. i say continue with the build; no turning back now.

research suspension geometry... what you have is extremely dangerous and i wouldnt trust with anything more than an unridden show bike.