I take it all back, the government motor registry is a magical place where dreams are made. I have plates – problem solved. The CB100 is now fully road registered and the weekend is here. It is well and truly time to ride – well just as soon as this rain blows off.
The tale of this little bike keeps turning. Just when I was starting to rack up the possible uses for an unregisterable old bike, things sorted themselves out. Ok, so I took a leaf out of the “bullshit them a little” advice book – and the gruff men of the registry did the rest.
As I found out yesterday, Honda international just don’t have the records to say where and when an early 70’s bike first hit the roads. Or maybe they do, and it just couldn’t fit through the modern Honda Australia retail service center gateway. I don’t know. Either way, the information is not available to me. So I went to sleep yesterday thinking about what I could do with the bike.
I could sell it off, part-by-part, tearing it limb from limb. Not going to happen – I would sooner sell off a kidney than rip apart a machine with this much character.
I could strip it light, crank up the horsepower and race it on the bucket-racing circuit. Tiny bikes, big noise, mad men (and women) – I’ve always wanted to build a bike for the track – maybe this could be my chance.
I could trick it up with café racer parts and hock it off to the highest bidder online. It would surely sell- but it really would be an insult to the fine lines and creaky beautiful character of this 40 year old machine. Tricked up café racers just seem so supermarket in comparison to real gritty charm.
Maybe I could get compliance plates for an individual build. It sounds troublesome and expensive, but it could get us on the road eventually. I decided to find out more from the folks down at the registry first thing.
I started with a little spiel about how I’d tracked down the previous owner and he’d told me about the bike being stored since it was last registered in the 70’s. I added that I’d found lots of evidence that the frame number was similar to other Australian delivery models. I mentioned that a thorough search with every state motor registry in the country had revealed no other registrations, that it wasn’t stolen and that it had never been on the import list. Mostly true – with just a hint of bullshit.
The fellow disappeared with my paperwork in a fairly similar fashion to our first encounter. I waited around thinking it was odd that the guys weren’t nearly as gruff at 8am on a Friday. Around the corner he came, and I instantly spotted a brand new ‘approved’ stamp plastered in the PASS box. I could hardly believe it, he was happy to register it.
We had a chat about the details – he mentioned that it was a 1976 model, and their vehicle identity expert was sure that the last two digits of the frame number (that happened to be 76) were actually the year made. I nodded, smiled and quashed every fibre of my being that wanted to scream out – ‘Nonsense – everyone knows the K2 model was made in 1972! Those last two digits mean nothing’. Of course I could be wrong, the internet has fooled me before.
I now have a 1972 Cb100 K2 Super Sport that the motor registry recognizes as a 1976. It doesn’t matter – its time to ride.
cb100ss 