Building a Cafe Racer for under $1,000 (Starting with a $400 Honda CB750)

guys it is another beautiful day in middle tennessee and i'm starting on my next project here now this is a late 70s early 80s cb 750 i believe it's a honda 750 cc kind of in between a sport and a street bike this is owned by my buddy reggie he bought it gosh at least two and a half years ago and he did a little bit of work to it he pulled the carburetors off took off the battery he rebuilt the carbs but never got them back on because of the temperamental rubber gaskets between the cylinder head and carbs that can be really annoying he did give me a set of new ones to install he wants to turn this into a cafe racer style bike so we went ahead and bought a few little odds and ends off of ebay we've got a cafe racer style seat the single headlight this little doohickey that welds on to the rear end a couple of clamp on handlebars to give it that kind of low mean look and then i've got the fuel tank it's up in the other garage so first things first the battery is two years old but it still had 11 and a half volts so i've got it hooked up to my charger here to see if we can give it a little bit of a boost hopefully that still works and then these new gaskets i'll get these installed put the carburetor on and then hopefully it'll fire right up there's a little bit of an electrical issue here you can see the wires are just cut i don't know exactly where they go i see that that a couple of them do go to what would be like a starter solenoid right here so we might have to bypass that maybe go on the old internet and see if i can find a wiring schematic but it should be pretty quick work to at least get that running so that's what i'm going to try and do right now all right guys i've got all these rubber gaskets on here if you notice at the top they're labeled one two three and four which is nice the numbers are supposed to be facing straight up so you can see it makes a nice even line they're all just a little bit different so if i didn't notice that boy that would have been difficult to install i was getting ready to put the carburetor on next and i was looking at this fuel inlet and it just kind of looked like it was in the wrong place the carburetor sits this way so it didn't make sense to me why the fuel inlet would be coming in from the bottom it looks like this is interchangeable with this one these are just crossover tubes to equalize the fuel delivery to all of the carburetors so i'm going to go ahead and pull this carburetor off switch this over to this side and then fish it up to the top where it has this little bracket right here that i believe goes right there that way the fuel inlet is right here because the petcock on the fuel tank is on the left side so it ends up being right here and this ends up looking like just about the right length to then get that fuel hooked up so i'll switch through those and then i should be able to put the carburetor on before i do that though i'm going to tackle the electrical the battery's been charging for a little while i'm going to go ahead and throw it on here and then just crank it over with an open intake to just get the oil system all primed up and then make sure that everything is working before i put the carburetor and start the fuel system so let's get to it well this is clearly not the right battery look how much room we've got there and then it's actually not even sitting on the bottom here i've got it all hooked up and i turned the key and it looks like we are getting at least some power so i'm going to go ahead and throw this gopro on the tripod here and we'll see if it cranks over [Music] boy you hear that little solenoid trying all right let me see if i can hook up the jumper to it it's going to be a little bit tight i just don't have a lot of room i definitely don't want to touch any metal to metal there let's see what i can do no no no no no no nice got good suction out of each one of the cylinders electronics seem to be hanging in there i'm going to go ahead and measure the actually i'll probably just look up the crank battery for this bike um i may have to decode the vin number to figure out what the heck this thing even is we do have a little bit of a leak nothing too too bad it looks like the electronics that come through right there if i'm not mistaken there's usually a little rotor and a stator there in lieu of an alternator so it has basically a built-in generator and these little electronic connectors can sometimes fail over time just because the rubber gets all dry so i'll look into that otherwise hey we're hanging in there time to get these carburetors on all right so i have a spare fuel tank this came off a generator that i installed on the pizza truck that lives in illinois and because of their stupid laws the generator had to be powered by the same fuel source as the vehicle so i had to scrap this fuel tank and have the generator powered by the truck which left me with this empty one now i'm just gonna have to hook up the petcock here to the fuel source right here for these carburetors i'm going to fill it up hopefully we're not going to have any leaks i'll give it an old taparuski on these bowls because they may be stuck if the bowl is stuck open we're going to see fuel dribble out of the bottom here like i said hopefully that's not the case once i verified that it is not leaking i'm going to spray a little uh wd-40 into these carburetors to hopefully lube them up so that they're not all sticky wicky and then we'll see if this thing fires up so let's get to it [Music] [Applause] for dude that thing is wicked loud awesome right dude that is so cool all right we've got a couple leaks on this fuel tank you can see where there's a little bit of rust residue that's because it came out of this little goobery weld we've got here and then another one right here so you can see somebody tried to repair it the sealant would almost certainly seal those up because those are pinholes but i just don't like the look of this here so i'm going to grind this all down get some nice metal to weld to and then we'll seal it up properly [Music] [Music] all right guys the gas tank is all sealed up is it looking good i put it on the bike just so that i could get the rear seat mounted up against it i'm gonna pull the tank off give that to my buddy reggie and then he'll film painting it he's doing something pretty cool i'd like you to see for this rear seat this is not for this bike this is off of something a little bit different so it doesn't line up exactly what i'm going to do on this little bracket right here around these little bolts rather i'm going to build a bracket that slips underneath the gas tank bracket so it holds the front nice and tight and then in the rear i'm just going to have to drill a couple holes into the subframe here and then put the bolts in from the inside now for the back i've got where is it where is it where is it where is it here it is i've got this that i'm going to go ahead and weld on and have it come out just a little bit past the seat so this whole back section is going to get chopped off and replaced with this and then in the front what i'd like to do today is get these handle bars removed and then i've got these over here from a dirt bike that we're going to end up instead of mounting them this way we're going to end up flipping them backwards mounting them this way to give it a really super low profile so first things first let's get this rear end marked up and chopped up [Music] do [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] all right guys so here's the gas tank from reggie i think it came out awesome we've got the united states flag on one side and then the brazilian flag on the other and if you want kind of looks like the mexican flag on top now the next thing we have to do is the exhaust i found a complete exhaust system for this but it was like 300 and that does not fit into the junkyard style build that we're doing here now the exhaust that's currently on it is a little bit goofy you can see we've cut it right here there is a type of muffler on this side basically the exhaust goes in the one chamber in the center there and then it goes into the bigger chamber and then finds its way out this little side pipe and then eventually exits right here it will quiet it down but not a ton now on this side there is nothing at all so i came up with a solution that i think will work but most importantly is super cheap so you can see i've already cut that there and i've cut this one here i'm going to have to cut this a little bit farther to get rid of the internal muffler and then we're basically building our own mufflers so right here i got these for i think ten dollars on amazon and then i've got this exhaust fiberglass material i'm gonna cut that fiberglass material wrap it around this use some stainless steel zip ties to hold it in place and then i'm gonna use this this is an old header flange that i had just in a pile of used parts i'm going to weld this in like so and then i'm going to take the whole thing slide it on like that and then i'll seam weld it along the outside so you can then smooth it down and then reggie will polish these all up it's like a 25 dollar solution to a 300 problem and i think it'll be perfect the only question that i've got is this center cap here if we don't have that cap you see some of the exhaust gases will go straight through the center and it might be a little bit too loud if we do end up putting this cap in here and welding that shut then all of the exhaust gases have to travel through the side and depending on how thick the fiberglass ends up around here it might end up being too restrictive so the plan is tack weld this up tack it onto the bike start it up see how it sounds if it's too loud i'll end up putting the cap on as a restrictor if it's not too loud i'm going to leave the cap off and then we'll take everything off again give it to reggie and then have him polish it up and then we're good to go so let's get to it [Music] so i wanted to show you guys this is how i have the fiberglass set up basically i stuff it in there and then i wrap it around and then i use that stainless steel zip tie on the outside to hold everything in and it just barely squeezes inside of the factory housing so i'm gonna go ahead and slide that in do a tack weld here and here just enough to hold it so that we can then fire up the vehicle see how it sounds it's probably not a bad idea to do one with the fiberglass and one without and then we can do a side by side so let's do that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] i want to see if this thing starts i already put the fuel in there oh yeah all right here we go [Music] wow crazy everyone so there is a huge difference between the exhaust on this side with the fiberglass and on the other side without it um let me see if i can get the sound set up so this is the side that has the fiberglass i'm gonna fire it up and now this is the side without so let me pack that with the fiberglass and then uh fire back up again all right i've got the fiberglass in there let's see how it sounds now all right i've got the new throttle installed i absolutely love it except for the very tip right here if you notice the for rule that's on here is just very small and when i try and route it into the carburetor it doesn't want to fit because this is what the original one looks like much bigger so my plan is i'm going to cut this wire off i'm going to drill a hole through the center and then i'm going to cut a nice little line through it so that i can fit the old ferrule into the new one and then i'm going to solder it up so that it holds strong i don't know if it's going to work let's give it a shot [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so uh [Music] [Music] [Music] thanks for watching everybody bye-bye thanks for watching everyone bye-bye

Channel: Austin Coulson

Views: 1,057,311

Keywords: motorcycle, cafe racer timelapse, cafe racer, cafe racer build timelapse, complete cafe racer build, cafe racer build start to finish, how to build a cafe racer, cb750 cafe racer, honda cb750 cafe racer, honda cafe racer build, honda cb750 complete build, honda cb750 timelapse build, cb750 timelapse build, cafe racer time lapse build

Id: xIzD2_bJRsk

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021