In 1968, a year before coming out with the CB750, Honda introduced the bike that would become America’s all-time best-seller. The CB350 sold over 300,000 bikes during its five-year run, and as far as I can determine, no bike since has touched those sales numbers. Still, it was pure street. An important contributing factor to that record was that it was offered in street bike, scrambler, and on/off road versions: Whatever you wanted to do, one of these bikes was ready and willing to take it on. This picture is of the CB350, which was the most popular variant, but, at least in my opinion, not the best one.
I don’t know of any races that this bike won, but winning races wasn’t its reason for being. Its mission was to provide reliable transportation while entertaining its rider. Well, it surely entertained this one. Let me explain…
I became acquainted with the Honda 350 in 1971. I was in Vietnamese-language school at Fort Bliss, in El Paso. Before I left Maryland for Texas, I sold my bike and bought a truck, which I intended to fill up with a dirt bike once I got there. I dropped by Yamaha and Kawasaki dealers, but the bikes that caught my attention lived at Honda. Honda had just introduced this little jewel (SL175) of a four-stroke twin.
I knew this bike wasn’t quite as good off-road as the two-stroke singles. However, I was certain that any bike I owned was going to get a lot of use both on- and off-road. I took the seat of the 350 and… bummer. For this bike I needed longer legs. Next I tried the 175 and found it a perfect fit. A couple of times around the block was enough to convince me it had all the motor I needed. I had learned the beauty of compromise: It was a twin of the bike above. I put about 6,000 (mostly off-road) miles on my bike during the 35 weeks I spent learning Vietnamese.
So what’s a 175 anecdote doing in an article about the 350, you ask. Read on. Anyway, I had a good buddy who was also in my Vietnamese class. I am certain that each of us was the one that the other’s parents had warned him about. We will call him Tom. Actually, his name was Walter but his Japanese wife couldn’t pronounce it without great difficulty. Tom wanted a bike and he had longer legs than I (then again, so does your kid sister).
Anyway, Tom loved the 350. This bike is identical to his. We made our choices for different reasons, but both of us were happy with our bikes and besides, there really wasn’t much his could do that mine couldn’t. Sure, his bike accelerated faster on the highway, but there were things only mine could do thanks to its lighter weight. We covered a lot of miles on those bikes, most of them in the desert. Both bikes were five-peed twins with dual carbs. His pulled 36 horsepower, versus 20 for mine.
This bike is the street scrambler. Frankly, I never could see any reason to have one. It’s a street bike with upswept pipes riding on tires with more aggressive tread. If you’re taking one off-road, you had better not challenge it much. The pipes keep it from being hung on smaller stuff, and a skidplate (fit your own) would make it a little more versatile. It was better on the street than the SL models, but much worse in the dirt. Pretty worthless, in my opinion, but it sold well.
Just to show that they could do it again, Honda came out with the CL175. I can’t remember anyone who owned one, but someone, somewhere must have.
Pure street, though. If you were headed off-road, you’d best take along a friend with a rope. A classmate of mine proved so in the desert.
Some of the men in my class were Navy Seals. One of them owned a CB175 like this. If I recall correctly, he rode it home to Virginia from Texas after school ended, and then from Virginia to California. His only problem during the trip occurred in Mississippi. He’d parked outside a local bar and the ground wouldn’t hold the kickstand. The bike fell over, cracking the case on a rock while he was inside. He made the repair with J-B Weld and continued the trip.
Actually, that repair is the only part of this story I know to be true. There had been no J-B Weld on the bike in Texas, but in California, there it was. You probably had to know him. Sometimes a brain is not a sailor’s highest-functioning body part, although this one was pretty cool.
I hurt myself only once, and the bike was stolen only once. Yes, those two events are connected. I was in the desert, doing my best Evel Knievel impersonation. (In the interest of full disclosure, this is not actually me). I approached a dune, looked it over, and then went back to build up enough speed to jump it. When I reached the top I saw a large pit that on the other side, one I couldn’t clear. At that point I learned some things I could only have imagined before: When you bottom out, chances are you will bend handlebars before wheels; You can get a bike out of a pit, even with a stiff leg, if it will run; Good liquor makes bad pain tolerable; and finally, you can ride a considerable distance while standing on an unbending leg–if you must.
Under the heading of things to be grateful for, the hole hadn’t been a latrine. I couldn’t ride for a spell and the bike was parked outside the barracks. One night someone took it. The MP’s recovered it and the insurance fixed it. Honda didn’t have a stock wheel so I was given one off a CL.
At the time I had a larger rear sprocket put on the bike. That reduced my top speed but made the bike much more desert-ready. There were a group of us who fooled around in the desert and the gearing made my bike as bad there as some twice its size. Let’s not talk about the highway.
There’s one more story I have to relate. My friend Tom decided his bike would make a good cruiser. After graduation from language school, I was on leave in Kansas and Tom in Arizona. He decided to come visit me before we went to California. Wanted to see the museum in Dodge City, if I remember correctly. The SL350 was geared too low to make a good highway bike. It vibrated quite a bit and his header pipe broke. It was pretty loud by the time he got to Kansas.
No problem, you say–throw it in the back of the truck and go. Good idea, but by this time I’d decided that going to Vietnam made it a good idea to have a disposable vehicle. I had sold my truck and bought a ’61 VW. I did have a trailer hitch (which, looking back, was a costly mistake). We went to a welding shop that welded a pipe the size of his axle to the top of a trailer ball. It looked a little bit like this. The pipe was long enough that we pulled the wheel, bolted the forks to the pipe, and then attached tie-downs to the bumper. The bike went back to Arizona and on to California behind my little bug. I kept its front wheel in my back seat during the entire trip.
Well, enough sea stories. Honda sleeved the 350 down to a 250 for sale in England, ostensibly to keep the cost of rider permits and insurance in a lower bracket. You must read the badges to tell them apart.
In 1974, the 350 was replaced by the totally different 360, which stuck around until 1976.
However, the real replacement for the CB350 was the CB3504, which was coordinated with the four- cylinder 500’s and 750’s. The SL175 was replaced by the XL175, a single-cylinder bike that was better suited for the dirt. It became the basis for a whole family of XL thumpers.
President Nixon thought better of sending me to Vietnam (for a third time). After 35 weeks of language school, and about another six in amphibious school, he gave my job to a Vietnamese. I wound up in Panama, where I was able to ride a number of bikes and continue living. This picture is of one of the locks in the Panama Canal. For four years I drove past the Pacific locks; all it taught me is that quite often, it is indeed unwise to volunteer for most things.
Ah, my first and only bike! I bought one third hand in 1972 from a good friend. He had replaced the timing chain, but forgot to set the tensioner quite right. About 100 miles in, the chain broke, taking a valve and a piston with it. We rebuilt the engine in the kitchen of the rooming house I lived in (didn’t please the other tenants, nor the landlord…). One minor glitch was a piston assembly for the CV carbs. One had a split diaphram, so in getting the bits, I bought a new one. Much later, when I was investigating the poor mileage and fouling plugs, I got a look at both carbs side by side and saw that I had a mismatch. Thus, seriously rich mixture. When fixed, the bike ran reasonably well.
Turns out we had overdone the gasket cement (Gaskecinch, a rubber cement) and underdone the cleanup. 18 months later, the cam shaft seized (fixable with new journals), but this was a chronic problem. After the second major seizure (gasket cement clogging the oil pump intake), I scrapped the bike, but I learned a bit about wrenching from it. Still, a fun bike.
These were beautiful bikes. I think that the 300-500 cc size has a lot of appeal. Am I correct in remembering that the CB version had a 360 degree crank while the CL version had 180? I have always been in favor of the 180 for a parallel twin as the thought of those two pistons traveling up and down together lacks a certain mechanical aesthetic quality.
Nope: the CL was 180 degrees. The 305 Hawk had a 360 degree crank, from what I heard.
I really enjoy the motorcycle discussions. I know little about bikes, but I’m very interested.
Yet another CC feature that has me all weepy and nostalgic. I’ve never owned a bike myself, but if I did, a Honda CB350 would be my first choice. Why? My younger brother had one in black many years ago, and I rode it a few times. Obviously a bit light for long cruises, but a very pleasant hander (IIRC), and sufficient power for tootling around town or little windey roads.
These things are the first image that comes into my heasd when I think “motorcycle”, even more so than Harleys.
I remember when the 360 came out people said how much better the 350 was. I have never actually ever figured out why.
Another classic Honda example of something being a complete improvement on paper, but when you rode it it wasn’t as good. The biggest negative against the CB360 was that it had no sporting feel to it at all. It was totally a commuter bike. Then again, you wanted sport, you went for one of Honda’s little four cylinders, or a Yamaha RD.
My car-mentor Howard had a thing for motorcycles. He started small with a Honda 50, then a 90. He quickly graduated to a 350, and kept the small ones for us kids to ride at some isolated property in Michigan where the family would go on trips. Years later, I stopped by to show him some new car I had bought, and he was cleaning out the garage. He told me that the 350 needed some exercise, and asked if I would run it up and down the street a few times.
I had logged quite a bit of time on the little Hondas, but never on this one. So, mark this one down as the only “real” motorcycle I have ever driven.
Thanks for the background and context on these.
I bought a 1970 CL350 from a fraternity brother in about 1979, sight unseen for $100. I can attest that it was a good bike for around town but a buzzing vibrator on the highway and too heavy for serious off road. Good deal for $100 though.
I graduated and got married in 1981, and with other interests and the 350 badly needing a valve train adjustment it was parked leaning against our rental duplex. In 1982 I planted a garden and sometime when the veggies were already coming in I realized that spot was where I parked the bike the fall before. Somebody made off with it and I did not notice for weeks or months. Easy come, easy go.
Your dune story had me laughing – hope you didn’t get too banged up.
Are you related to Wile E. Coyote by any chance?
I think he was smarter than me. I was in the running for the Darwin award.
My second motorcycle, my first real motorcycle (I outgrew that 100cc Kawasaki in about four weeks, but am still convinced that’s the real way to learn to ride a motorcycle), and after about a year my first cafe racer (a tradition that continues). Mine was a ’72, originally identical to the one in picture #1 except that it was gold and black. Bought it from an English professor at my college in 1976.
Cafe racer he says. Cafe parts weren’t available for that bike – ever (it wasn’t considered sporting enough in the industry) so I made do with modified drag bars and rod off the passenger seat and footpegs. Learned very quickly that you didn’t expect to chase after RD400′s and CB400/4′s unless you like spending lots of time catching up when they waited.
It was truly an excellent bike. Sold mine in 1980 with 25,000 on the clock having just bought my first Triumph Bonneville. Yeah, it was a bit on the heavy side (those exhaust systems weight something like 15 pounds apiece, but it handled well, and took me over half the east coast in a four year period. With drag bars and riding off the passenger pegs.
Unfortunately, I sold the bike to a complete asshole. He blew it up in three weeks then tried to pressure me into refunding his money because “the bike was no good”. Thus starting a history of selling bikes that treated me very well to people who treated them like crap. To the point that I cringe on selling a bike to anyone nowadays.
These bikes were an interesting time for Honda. They started out with a really excellent middleweight twin (CB350 family), replaced it with a good but too pedestrian middleweight twin (CB360 – although it’s justified by the CB350/4 and especially the
CB400/4 picking up the sporting side), and then replaced that by the complete piece of crap CB400T – which was supposed to replace both the mundane commuter bike AND the full bore sporter. It didn’t replace either of them very well.
I learned to ride on a Suzuki DS-80, starting at about age twelve. By the time I was sixteen and got my motorcycle licence, I had spent thousands of hours screaming around on logging roads. Indeed the best way to learn!
By the way, the bit with the English CB250 was due to English motorcycle law insisting that a new rider was limited to 250cc and a big red “L” on the front and back of the bike. I believe that went on for a year.
The English are smart. Under no condition were you allowed to go into a motorcycle shop, buy a new first bike, and immediately start faking it that you’re cool and experienced. No, for the first year you absolutely must look like a dork in public. And once you’ve gained the experience and know what you’re doing, then you’re allowed to look cool.
I always figured that had a lot to do with the ability of the average Brit to ride the average Yank’s ass off when it came to motorcycles. They had to learn, not just pose.
Interestingly, Skye, the rules are the same here in British Columbia now. For the learning period, a rider is limited to 125cc. Once they pass their provisional test, they are limited to 250 cc. After two years, any novice rider can take the test for a full licence. Since these rules came in five years ago, there has been a real reduction in kids splattering themselves all over solid objects. I am all for it since it keeps the fools off bikes, the idiots that tar all of us with their brushes.
What this means is we now have a wide variety of small bikes available, like the CBR125 and CB250 to fill that void. The 125 is a great little bike and retails at like $2399 including freight and PDI, although they tried $$3495+$499 freight and $150 doc fees. No surprise they didn’t sell many bikes at that price!
I commuted to college on a CB175 and a buddy had a CL350. The “Scrambler” pipes were worse than worthless. Imagine a female passenger with the then popular white plastic boots and those hot pipes. Good times.