CT90 Restoration Adventures

I have a 1971 CT90 I am working on and had an interesting electrical problem when I went to reattach the connector from the main with harness to the wires coming from the stator within the crankcase.  While the one wire for the neutral switch was correctly colored, the other three wires had a cloth overboard and did not have any color. The answer to how you can figure out what the colors should be on a stator with faded colors can be found by joining the Honda 6 Volt group on Facebook. In the file section of this group, John Pardue was kind enough to share a very simple test you can perform that will identify what wire is what color.  Here is a link to that file in that group, but you will most likely have to join which is very worthwhile as there is a lot of great information shared. The Pardue Brothers web site also has a lot of useful electrical related information and products to help with your CT90 restoration project. Helpful Links   (Shop Manuals, W...

A lot of times when you pick up an old CT90 some part of the wire harness may be damaged and need to be repaired.  While everyone who works in their shop or on bikes and vehicles knows how to solder to some degree, I thought I would provide a little electrical help and share how I go about soldering two wires together to repair a wire harness. The first thing I will say is that if you plan on bringing old CT90's back to life on a regular basis keep an eye out for old partial wiring harnesses and pick them up when you can.  Being able to salvage sections of wire in the right color and with a pin or socket at the end always makes for a much easier and cleaner repair. Some people may ask why not just use a crimp style butt connector to join two wires.  While a butt connector would work and be functional, it's not that clean and over the life of a bike I feel a nice soldered joint will hold up much better and less likely to give you a problem when your 10 miles up an old...

One of the most common items to find not working on old CT90's is the rectifier.  While a CT90 may start with a poor rectifier the rectifiers primary purpose is to take the alternating current from the genorator in the engine and convert that to direct current or voltage to charge the battery. If you are looking for information on how to test your existing CT90 rectifier, I made a post at this link that includes a step by step process for performing the test. While you could always purchase a new rectifier from any one of the outfits that carry replacement CT90 parts, one of the cheapest ways to go is to get a rectifier from Radio Shack that will only cost about four dollars, but does require some minor modifications to the wiring on your CT90.  If your looking to do a complete restoration by all means go out and spend the $15.00 to $30.00 for a replacement rectifier, but if you looking for a cheap but very robust solution, go down to your local Radio Shack and pick up t...

General Thoughts - Updated 1/10/19 When buying a CT90 you need to decide beforehand what you are really looking for with respect to do you want a project to work on or do you want a fully restored bike that starts first kick. There are no hard and fast rules with the price you should expect to pay as it varies widely and a lot of the time the price may be driven by what someone has put into the bike while they have owned it. Below I'll provide you my opinion on what you might pay for bikes in various conditions and also some of the dealsI have come across and what I look for when I am buying bikes for a new project. In general I have found that older CT200's or CT90's without the dual range transmission will go for less than CT90's with telescoping front forks and a dual range transmission. The older CT200's with a pushrod engine are a fun bike to work on, but parts are not as readily available, so if you do go down that path be aware it will be a little mor...

I pulled together this blog to share some of what I have learned and continue to learn through my ongoing efforts to restore a number of Honda CT90's.  I retired back in 2015 and I always enjoyed working on vehicles and was looking for another project and didn't want to take on another car restoration at that point in time and I started to look for something physically smaller where I wouldn't have to use a engine hoist or lift to work on the vehicle which got me looking at doing a motorcycle. When I was younger I always liked CT90's, but never owned one and started to think it would be nice to have a CT90 up at our second home up on Camano Island in Washington state, so I set out to find a  project CT90's to bring back to life and ended up running into a guy who had three non running project CT90's he wanted to get rid of and offered me a deal I couldn't refuse. Along the way I found that I really enjoyed working on these bikes and have now somehow man...