While helping a neighbor move some boxes and burlap sacks, I uncovered what would become my first of many motorcycles: a 1973 honda cl125s, single cylinder four stroke. Then aged 12, I was instantly enamored with the little bike’s orange gas tank, flat seat, and cycloptic headlight, wide open and ready to go.

“Hey, does this run?”

“Its been sitting there for 20 years or so.” He paused and looked at me. “Why?’ he asked with a knowing grin. My intentions were evidently clear. He proceed to tell me that if I was able to push it up the hill to my house and figure out how to get it running, he would sell it to me for my labor.

After a late night and early morning of tinkering with the fuel system and taking apart and cleaning the carburetor, I was able to wake the long slumbering cycle with some fresh gas and a few jumps on the kick starter. When that tiny piston began explosively revolving in the cylinder head, a fire was started in my heart: fixing and riding motorcycles will always make me happy.

Forward a decade to my first fast bike, which, it so happens is the first fast cheap bike, a 1971 CB750, Soichiro Honda’s answer to the raucous twins out of England and America’s agricultural Harleys. With a inline four cylinder engine producing 68 horsepower, and a single overhead camshaft to keep the valves dancing in synchronicity with all four pistons, this 500 pound bike was a decade ahead of all other manufacturers.

Now forward another decade to the shop of Wasted Spark Motorcycles, where I currently apprentice with one of the most precise restorers of BMW, Norton, Harley and Vincent motorcycles, Richard Barsotti. It is there that we are rebuilding the the carburetor in the video herewith. Call it non illegitmae carburatordum.

While working together on a bright April morning massing out every individual part of the bulky, classic V Twin belonging in an ultra rare 1958 XLCH Sportster, Richard mentioned to me that he was going to be, in a couple weeks, taking on a complete strip-down and restoration of the motor and transmission of a 1972 Honda CB750. I will be exploring thus personally uncharted territory of the exact same motor I’ve come to adore over the previous decade. I feel as Cousteau must have before a journey into the deep wilds of the ocean.