Where are you located? If I could jump on a bus and ride it back without too much red tape it'd be very very tempting....
That's a great bike that I'd hate to see stripped down for a cafe. If I did anything to it, I'd love to see the comstars rebuilt with the wider rims from this here '82 DOHC. (Which, by the way, is a bike that I'm swapping out to wire spokes and fat rims for a SOHC styled 7/11 build ha ha -wouldn't it be great to do up a SOHC in the DOHC style also? I've got some '77 rearset brackets I've been routing out for "lattice" style just like the CB1100F, so I've already got that very idea in mind ha ha.)
Damn though, a beautiful stock survivor like this, it'd be simply cruel to the breed to strip the hell out of it and restyle it for somebody's own "singular vision" ha ha. Even though I'm doing the same myself. It's just too bad the Comstar wheeled bikes aren't as appreciated, let alone the DOHC, as much as they should be.
((((They're really great wheels you know. Lighter than cast mags, stiffer than spoked plus tubeless to boot. Copied from the Astralite racing wheels of the period, just as all of the period cast mags copied Lesters and Henry Abe etc etc - at least Honda had the good brains to copy the best wheels of the whole bunch, the same wheels which they'd used on their endurance racers of the day, reproduced with an eye for function and weight over simple trendy aesthetics. It's just too bad they didn't get the rear hubs as light as the Astra-lites. From what I've HEARD in any case. Some mill work could probably fix all of that. On the hubs I mean. Most people would tell you that you can't rebuild the things, but if you follow all of the right methods and check them regularly just as you would with a wire spoked wheel, well you could REALLY play around with 'em. I can think of several very gnarly race bikes with rebuilt comstars on 'em. Though, I dunno how the little plastic rivet covers on the '78 wheels could be replaced after the fact.... Even if you DIDN'T mess with the blades hubs and rivets, you could still build a very very light-weight set from two front 18" reverse comstars, GL1100 type, with a bolt-on cush drive from a Ducati, or better still a Gates Poly-Carbon GT belt drive for the added benefit of no longer losing all of that 5-10% of total available horses to the transmission losses inherent to the stock chain drive - it's a whole degree better, just like chain's better than shaft -from the power transmission view -and the belt would have the shaft's maintenance benefit too AND the shock loading which necessitates the cush-drive in the first place would be taken care of by the belt's smooth nature. And if you wanted to widen the rims even further than the later comstar's 18 x 2.50" and 19" x 2.15" rims, well you could send 'em to Kosman industries and have them welded up to any width you desire. In their given dimensions though, I think you'd be hard pressed to find such stiff shouldered rims in any lighter a form than the D.I.D. rims built into the OEM comstars....
All I'm saying is, the Comstars can be built up to be one hell of a set of race wheels if a person took the time to play around with 'em. One of these days I'd like to build a set of really awesome Comstars, but I'd like 'em to look like the original non-reverse silver ones, which probably precludes the 18" front rim ... unless the blades from some kind of smaller bike could be used....))))
This bike of yours, I'd hate to low-ball you on it. And hell, I'm dumping a fat wad of dough into my DOHC project right now for purely sentimental reasons. And yet I can really appreciate the bike, of all of the Honda four street-bikes (which is to say, NOT the RSC, CR750, or the CB1100R) whether SOHC or DOHC - it's up there in my TOP THREE of desireables. Canadian spec CB1100F, the Sand/Die-Cast, and this version of 'F right here because it's the perfect synthesis of those two extremes. And not necessarily in that order.
It's just too bad that the SOHC crowd doesn't appreciate the features of it. The Dunstall style rear-sets could be very easily modded for any type of position, and then a spare set could be swapped in with a couple of bolts so that different riders had perfect ergonomics after five minutes of wrenching. The tubeless rims have gotta be lighter overall in spite of not being wire spoked. The triple disc brakes. The hotter engine. You'd have to sink a good chunk of change into any earlier SOHC to get the same performance out of it.
I've never understood why all of the DOHC Comstar wheels aren't snapped up by the early model owners. Or the 37mm forks for that matter. Ah, but no - everybody wants their SOHC to look like the '69, and here I am doing the same damn thing with my '82.
If my DOHC engine fires up clean with the new exhaust, and doesn't need three or four grand dumped into it just to be road-worthy, well maybe then I could SAVE UP to make you an offer.... But I think you should set a proper, high end collector value on this survivor of yours. The type of venue where you SHOULD be selling it would be this:
http://raresportbikesforsale.com/
The site surely has a lot of crazy expensive shit which is only available for pickup in UAE or Dubai or some such shit, and yet at the same time they still list beautiful survivors of ICONIC model/year sport-bikes. That's exactly the place I'd expect to see a bike like yours.
Certainly not "perfect winter cafe project" ugh -that right there says straight up "I have no appreciation for this bike and that's why I'm selling it". But then, you're hearing that from a guy who's a full-on DOHC lover, (though, I might add, not a died in the wool DOHC lover but rather a reluctant convert who saw the error of his ways) who doesn't subscribe to the usual magazine "Honda stopped making the CB750 in 1978" type of bullshit. They've had it wrong all along - it should have read: "...in '79 Honda somewhat revised the CB750's engine design...." But the SOHC community is too rife with that same old crappy press going around in circulation over and over and over, perpetuating the myth that the bike was NEVER improved, that it had only gone down hill from the start when they de-tuned the thing. To ME at least, I see a true lineage through the entire family tree right down to today's CB1000R. People have certainly screwed with the fucking BODYWORK over the years, I won't deny that.
But we humans can't deny a fashion faux pas or two of our OWN throughout the same time-line, can we?
Well, until I could afford to have a collection spanning the ENTIRE lineage, I'd want to at least have a few choice snippets from it, the truely iconic prize-fighters of the period, which enjoyed those race-bred technology slash life-blood transfers which gave the CBRs of today their rock star credibility, and the LAST of each incarnation means at least as much to that story as the first.
-Sigh.
