It’s a 350-mile one-way trek for me to drive up to the South Point resort hotel for the annual Mecum Motorcycle auctions, featuring 2,000 motorcycles for sale. Prices ranged from $500 to $330k with Mecum taking in money from both the bidder and the seller, per usual. Not mentioned clearly is if the bikes have a title or not in most cases. If no title, the bikes are NV taxed at 9% of the sale price! I got hit with an extra $400 last year on my CB77 racer, so it is a heavy hit for most unsuspecting buyers.
That aside, it was another amazing year of bikes of all shapes, sizes, makes, models and years. Board track racers were selling for $100k, Honda Z50s for $10k and the pair of un-crated CB125S bikes sold for $25k! There is no rhyme or reason to what some bikes sold for. Harley Baggers were selling for $2500 in some cases. When I walked into the room on Wednesday morning an SL125 and SL175 both were hammered for $10k. The prototype CB750 belonging to “Mr. Sandcast” Vic World hammered out at $313k and the George Beale RC174 incredible replica went into the $330K range.
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I almost passed on making the long journey again, as I had no plans of buying anything and staying at the hotel was $90+ per night last year, even with the discount. The one big draw is meeting up with many of my friends and acquaintances, many of which go back well into the last Century. I sold some CB750 parts to Vic World back in the 1980s, when he was on the search worldwide to build his collection of parts to build up sandcast CB750 bikes. My friend Tony Moseley, who is a retired Kawasaki manager was last seen at Daytona back in the 1990s, as best as we could recall.
Part of the encouragement to drive up, was from a message from my friend Don Scott Peterson, who lives in N. Las Vegas. He’s been wrangling old Hondas for many years, rebuilding and restoring some rare machines, including the #2 CL77 some years back. Mr. Peterson contacted me a few months ago about encouraging me to come up and help him clear out his leftover Honda parts, as he was down to two final machines: a CL77 and a CA77. He offered to allow me to stay at his place for free, but the downside was that he was 25 miles away from the auction site, which turned into a 30 minute drive each way during the week. A round trip in my Tacoma worked out to about $6 in gas per trip. Costco was selling regular for $2.89 when I was there. I trekked back and forth during the Wed-Friday events, having dinner with a couple of groups at the end of the day.
Scott started to roll out his “leftovers” and I got the feeling that it was going to fill up my Tacoma’s bed and then some, so I ended up renting a U-Haul trailer for $140 for the one-way drive. The parts ranged from C200-early CT90 models, to various engine parts for CB/CL72-77s. The sparkling shiny alloy CL72 racing gas tank turned out to be a copy made in India, which was quite a feat of design and assembly, but there were a lot of details that were less than factory-correct. Still, they are impressive works of art, assuming that they will hold gasoline correctly. I worked with a customer who had a metal CL72 tank from India and the petcock holes were incorrectly drilled. It had to be re-welded twice to get it functional.
Other boxes of parts revealed a bin full of CB160 transmission parts, gaskets, wiring harnesses and other model-specific items. A number of 250-305 cylinder heads, bare and complete weighed down the truck bed right away. A lovely C72 fuel tank and headlight shell were already painted and ready to use. Other interesting bits included a set of big bore pistons (+3.00mm), along with a set of unbored cylinders and a crankshaft.
Exhaust parts included some rough Dream mufflers, a WEBCO straight pipe for an S90, and some CL72 exhaust pipes that were corroded around the head pipe bends.
Having already renting a 5x10’ storage space locally for the N. Cal-Los Gatos CB77 parts haul, it was clear that more space would be required. A call to the office mentioned ONE last 5x10’ space left and I could go on a waiting list for a 10x10’ street level unit. I asked them to hold that one and headed for home on Saturday afternoon.
I hauled the trailer and truckload of parts back to San Diego in about 6 hours, parking the rig in front of the house overnight. I joined my Sunday riding buddies for our morning breakfast ride and then came home, grabbed the truck and trailer, then headed for the storage company. The available 5x10’ was sufficient for loading up the parts. Thereafter, I returned the trailer to the local U-Haul store and was done for the day.
I’ll be adding various parts from the new supply to various forums in the weeks to come. I’m working on completion of the 1961 CB77 #557, so I can clear if off of my work bench. Because of my friend Tuan, who steered my onto the CB77 in Burbank, now I am committed to driving back to Riverside to pick up a 1964 CL72 which he bought and then re-sold to me, as I am much closer than Wisconsin.
So, it’s been a busy week in Lake Wobegon… sorry La Presa, CA. The beat goes on and the stories will continue.
Bill Silver aka MrHonda
www.vintagehonda.com
