The Honda CB750 was NOT what you think

I've made quite a few videos about bikes from the 1970s that were influenced heavily by this bike we're talking about today the motorcycle that many would argue really is the goat now if you're a little older you might not know what this term means but goat is greatest of all time and judging by my analytics and demographics some of you might not know that this is the CB750 and you can make entire videos just about the influence of the Honda CB750 whether it's the ongoing development of inline 4 engines in the motorcycle world to the massive increase in reliability in motorcycles to the way that this bike really helped bring down the British motorcycle industry but today we're looking specifically at the bike itself how it was developed what kind of bike it really was and why there might be some misconceptions about this motorcycle the story of the CB750 really starts in 1967. Honda had just taken three of the Grand Prix titles in 66 but they decided to take a break from racing to bring their high revving multi-cylinder performance motorcycles to the production side and to the general public despite their worldwide success making reliable utilitarian single cylinder and Twins and some sporty machines you know think Innovative bikes like the double overhead cam cb450 it was time to make a new kind of motorcycle regardless of their progress made on the racetrack 1966 actually marked a downturn in sales for Honda specifically in the United States when on Sunday so on Monday really has never been Honda's business model the United States was longing for a new kind of big motorcycle the cb450 really was already in many ways a superior sporting machine to virtually anything the British had to offer but bigger was still better here in the U.S so a Bonneville 650 or a you know big BSA twin it was still viewed as a bigger faster motorcycle even though a cb450 was probably a better sporting machine already Honda had recently received word that the king of big sport bikes which was Triumph was developing a three-cylinder 750 cc motorcycle and that really gave Honda The Benchmark in terms of just the size but in their case they wanted to do one more cylinder and 750 CC's was the mark bigger than anything offered by any Japanese company and ultimately better than anything that Triumph would ever be able to drum up Honda's goals with the CB750 were basically this stability at cruising speed reliable powerful braking comfortable low vibration riding reliability at every level including Electronics longer service intervals than the competition and an original beautiful appealing design utilizing the best materials basically the ultimate motorcycle the company brought together a large 20-member team made up of the best mines at Honda to basically design and develop this motorcycle two major decisions were made in developing a reliable powerful compelling but also cost effective inline four-cylinder engine and those two major decisions are actually more about what was left out versus what was included see Honda knew how to make high revving multi-cylinder engines and also don't count out the influence of Honda's early Formula One race cars as well in the design of this kind of multi-cylinder engine but one needs to look no further than the iconic RC 166 a 250cc six-cylinder race engine revving past 18 000 RPM and powering Honda to dominance in 1966 but even beyond that Honda knew how to make high revving inline Force they had made so many of them for racing but that rc-166 engine and all of Honda's other race engines at the time utilized double overhead cams and wrapped four valves per cylinder I mean even the cb450 was a double overhead cam but early on Honda decided to make the CB750 a single overhead cam with just two valves per cylinder and that is the first major decision and the main thing that was sort of left out in comparison to those race engines is that they decided to go with less Valves and less cam but also Honda decided to go with chain driven gearbox and cams over gear driven ones and this made the Buy like more cost effective and helped bring the weight down the thing is though even with those concessions as we could call them versus their race bikes Hondas still had on their hands what would be the most advanced big multi-cylinder motorcycle available Honda did not need to utilize every single piece of their most advanced engineering skills and Feats to build the best motorcycle in the world and in fact operating at about I don't know 75 percent in terms of what they could build was actually ideal they could be able to keep the cost down which as we'll see is really the icing on the cake for the cb750s dominance but also make a bike that just was better for the General Public now one of the most interesting concessions when it comes to this engine is the use of plane bearings versus rolling bearings that decision to use plane bearings has everything to do with revs with this setup the CB750 would never be able to rev the way that the race engines did and again I actually think that this is a wise decision aside from the advantages of regular bearings because they do have advantages I actually think a lower revving inline 4 was the way to go for Honda in building the ultimate road bike motorcycles that make most of their power way up in the Rev range take a lot more skill to ride and aren't actually more fun and when you think about the motorcycles that were available in the 1960s I mean even the fastest motorcycles in the world on the production side were pretty much just torquey twins that hadn't really changed much in the 10 years prior to this bike coming out this was already going to be a completely new kind of motorcycle just in the fact that it was a somewhat high revving inline four but making it rev to like 15 1000 RPM would not have helped the bike at all Honda needed to be able to still bring over people who were used to bonnevilles and used to you know bsas and Nortons and all of the big twins that were available and even people who were riding you know cb450s and cb350s so keeping the revs to a minimal amount actually was a better option Honda also chose to give the 750 inline 4 an under square bore to stroke ratio unlike anything else in Honda's line at this time and mainly this helped to keep the engine width down and because hitting you know ridiculously high revs was not the purpose it didn't need to be over Square regardless the CB750 really let the proof be in the numbers 67 horsepower at 8 000 RPM 44 foot-pounds of torque at 7000 RPM and a standing quarter mile time of 13.5 seconds hitting just over 100 mile per hour in the quarter mile which is really good numbers I mean even today but at that point absolutely the outstanding numbers for this time to put this into perspective the Performance Machine coveted by Riders across the globe for the past 10 years or so prior to this bike coming out was the Triumph Bonneville which produced maybe 50 horsepower and you know quarter mile times aren't as simple to find for these bikes but I can tell you they're nowhere near what the CB750 was hitting the iconic Kawasaki Mach 3 was actually faster in the quarter mile and did beat the 750 to production but the CB750 would prove itself to be just an all-around better motorcycle in almost every area I think the main thing you have to understand with these early inline fours despite their incredible performance is that they came from the factory actually in a quite mild State Of Tune because for Honda the goal really wasn't to make some crazy high revving inline four I mean if they had wanted to make this bike produce like 85 horsepower they could have given it double overhead cams and made it rev to the moon and sure it would have been you know know a feat but that was not what they were trying to do at all because for Honda the goal was not a crazy high revving inline four it wasn't meant to be some sort of production racer and having the bike set up in sort of a mild State Of Tune meant that the ride ability of the bike went way up especially at low speeds and in that sense it's much more like say you know Indian or Henderson's wonderful four-cylinder touring machines from you know an era long gone at this point than say a modern inline four that revs to the Moon with massive amounts of time spent testing in sort of laboratory conditions testing the engine trying to essentially destroy it the result was that this simple reliable powerful power plant that's at the heart of the CB750 this engine and its successors would go down as some of the greatest engines in the history of production Vehicles if you've owned a CB750 or a CB550 or a cb400 you know these are the engines that pave the way for the future of motorcycle engine development but the CB750 was so much more than just a regular late 60s motorcycle that maybe had a groundbreaking engine attached to it Honda made sure that this bike would be better than anything you could buy at pretty much every level from a new type of electrical system to be used on a motorcycle taken from the automotive world to pushing the envelopes in regard to braking Honda knew from their experience building race bikes then motorcycle performance is often more about how fast you can make the bike stop versus how fast it will go Honda had stumbled upon an aftermarket disc brake setup assembly that was being made for the cb450 and once they got their hands on it they knew this was the route to go for the CB750 it needed to have disc brakes so they began developing an Innovative hydraulic setup for front disc brakes on the bike I mean later down the road the bike would get all disc brakes but from the beginning it was just front disc brakes and this would really set a precedent for the company going forward to to not only make faster more powerful more reliable motorcycles but also to make safer motorcycles and in the coming years Honda would continue to improve this technology and bring it to virtually every model in their lineup and push the industry to not just make more powerful engines but to make safer motorcycles now in terms of the frame and suspension the CB750 was actually relatively stiff and did lend itself to more sporty riding I wouldn't say that the motorcycle was the absolute most comfortable motorcycle that you could buy just in terms of the ride but because the seat was wide and comfortable and mainly because the vibration was almost eliminated at least in comparison to other big bikes at this time and even bikes going forward you know think Innovative motorcycles with great riding quality like the Norton Commando because the CB750 had that smooth inline four at the heart of the bike that was really what made the difference in terms of riding the bike for long distances and though this engine which was seemingly straight out of the future and would set the CB750 apart from everything released at this time by other big manufacturers though the engine is important it's the whole package from the reliable electric start to the beautiful gauges the overall classic design all of it put together so perfectly this would make the CB750 the obvious choice for Riders over Kawasaki's big offerings over Triumph or BSA or Norton I mean triumphs all new three-cylinder Trident would beat the 750 to the punch in terms of being revealed but everybody quickly forgot that bike when the CB750 was shown at the Tokyo motor show this motorcycle was everything you could ask for as a serious Rider who actually wanted to put down a lot of miles and it was amazingly affordable at just 14.95 significantly cheaper than the Trident and the BSA rocket and even cheaper than the Sportster by even more Honda's initial prediction of 1500 units per year for their new motorcycle quickly became 1500 units per month thousands of riders flocked to see the motorcycle unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in October of 69 as Honda had done with the Super Cub Honda chose to dedicate two plants to the production of the CB750 new Machining was developed for the engine but the lack of experience in building this kind of machine in Mass meant quite a lot of growing pains for Honda as a company on the production side they needed to produce upwards of 100 units per day once things really got going and they were barely on track to be able to make five a day at the beginning this meant delays and ultimately Honda was forced to use a completely new kind of molding if you're familiar with the cb750s and collecting them you know that those early sandcast models are worth quite a bit today because so few of them were made before Honda had to switch how they molded the engine ultimately Honda would figure out how to produce this motorcycle in mass and it would go down as one of the greatest motorcycles of all time now the CB750 really pushed the industry forward but not exactly in the way that I I think many of us assume I think we hear that iconic inline four and we observe this Spike through the lens of what would come after and through the lens of motorcycle history and yes it's true that inline fours would dominate the performance in sport bike Market basically until today and of course bikes like this bikes like the Z1 these would be sort of the groundwork for the Japanese companies to be able to build the high revving inline fours that they would build later on but in many ways the Kawasaki H2 Mach 3 and Mach 4 would actually sort of be the predecessor to Superbikes and sport bikes going forward I mean Kawasaki's Two Strokes they were that Relentless pursuit of speed and power with little concern for comfort those bikes epitomize what a sport bike is today much more than a CB750 and also you could point to the fact that two strokes really did go on to dominate and beat out the high revving four strokes I mean two strokes could potentially still be dominating racing if they weren't outlawed and when you dig in and look at what Honda was actually trying to accomplish with the CB750 and what they did accomplish the motorcycle itself really wasn't the first Superbike as I said before Kawasaki's two-stroke triples were much more Super Bike oriented with that Relentless pursuit of performance with little worry about comfort and on paper those motorcycles were faster I do think that sometimes when we look back at the CB750 we Overlook why Honda actually made this bike and really the kind of bike that they were trying to design and the kind of riders that it was meant for what the CB750 really was was a new kind of motorcycle sure incredibly fast sure incredibly powerful but not the fastest bike on the track or on the road I mean Riders will tell you out on the twisties even a Bonneville would outperform a CB750 but that's okay when you actually look at the initiative from Honda when making this bike those original goals set for the team when designing and developing the CB750 50 it wasn't about making the fastest road going sport bike it was more about making just the best all-around road bike that you could get enough power to cruise at highway speeds all day comfortably that reliability at every single level that Honda had already proven its machines to have the ease of use both in terms of the riding experience you know you just open your garage click a button and it starts every single time but also the ease of use when it comes to you know having the bike serviced and the service intervals it was less an out and out sport bike and really more of a Touring bike and in that regard I actually think that we should refer to the CB750 as the first sport touring bike I mean just think about this it's a fast motorcycle for its day no doubt but the focus is primarily on comfort and usability Sport tourers come in lots of different forms sometimes they do lean more heavily on the sports side sometimes they you know are more about Comfort maybe they're just really fast in a straight line you know and in this way a high Busa is a sport touring bike maybe they're built on an actual sport bike platform maybe they're sort of just developed for sport touring like say a new Moto Guzzi V100 but they all have one thing in common which is usability and comfort a Performance Motorcycle that's actually usable and in this regard the CB750 was a new kind of sport touring bike in line with bikes like the Vincent Black Shadow and the brough superior ss-100 that had come before it sure those bikes also produce big numbers for their day sure they're loud and Fast and Powerful but when you actually dig in and see what those bikes are about and even talk to the people who rode those bikes it's more about being able to put down big miles it's more about touring with comfort and ease it's more about just having a high quality machine that's usable whether you're puttering around in town or needing to pass somebody at 75 miles an hour and in that sense the CB750 was a new kind of motorcycle because no other company had made this kind of sport touring bike the way that Honda did with the CB750 they just nailed it no doubt many of you watching have owned cb750s and I'd love to hear from you guys and love to hear your stories in the comments below to further my point in this video I'll just refer to my parents who owned and rode a CB750 for a bit and they liked to mainly use it to go golfing that's right they would just strap their bags onto the motorcycle two up and take it golfing how weird is that but also yeah that's kind of the point thanks for watching guys we'll see you in the next video ride safe

Channel: bart

Views: 384,365

Keywords: bart, motorcycle, motorcycles, vintage, retro, classic, triumph, triumph bonneville, top, best, moto, bike, motorbike, honda, honda cb750, inline 4, engine, engines, honda cb, cb750, cb500, cb550, cb450, cb350, the honda cb750 was a new kind of motorcycle, sportbike, racing, motorcycle history, viral video, for you, honda history, honda cb history, greatest, greatest motorcycle, best motorcycle

Id: s6SzJsHOR9o

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023