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00:00:00Welcome to the Cycle World podcast. Welcome back. If you're a repeat listener, we thank you for that.
00:00:05Share this podcast with your friends if you think they would like it.
00:00:10Helps us tremendously, the more people who listen. We want to share
00:00:13the wonders of motorcycling with as many people as possible.
00:00:18And Kevin Cameron, of course, our technical editor for Cycle World, and I'm Mark Hoyer, the editor-in-chief.
00:00:24We've seen a lot of stuff and got to do a lot of neat things, and we love talking about motorcycles.
00:00:30We're coming up on our 100th episode.
00:00:33This episode is Honda saw the future, and the future was RPM, making power with revs.
00:00:43And Mr. Honda went to Isle of Man and came back with a few bikes, and they were, as Kevin was just telling me,
00:00:53fiddle-futzing around with some single-cylinder stuff. They were messing with some two-strokes.
00:00:57They built another single, the little single that kind of powered them into profitability.
00:01:021958.
00:01:04And then we did a podcast on that.
00:01:07And then, on the Cub, go check it out.
00:01:10Then they started ripping 250cc six-cylinders and 20,000 RPM, and Honda became the massive global powerhouse.
00:01:24Well, it was on its way, in any case.
00:01:26So that's what we're talking about here, and principally the birth of the twins that fueled so much kind of middleweight growth.
00:01:34We had 350s as fast as British 650s.
00:01:38And really, they came to define what a Honda motorcycle was meant to look like.
00:01:44They changed from something that they had borrowed and massaged to their liking,
00:01:51and then away they went building just Japanese motorcycles.
00:01:55And my, did we learn to love them.
00:01:57So set us on course, Kevin.
00:02:00Get us down the road.
00:02:01Release the clutch.
00:02:04Well, there were, at one point, say 1950, 52, around 200 little outfits trying to make motorcycles in Japan.
00:02:18And the reason that there were so many was because Japan is sort of a linear string of islands and manufactures in particular markets.
00:02:34But nobody had created an organization that could serve the entire nation.
00:02:42And what everybody was building was single-cylinder bikes.
00:02:50Some were building two-strokes.
00:02:52Honda started out that way.
00:02:55Mr. Honda, when the war ended, of course, Japan was in ruins.
00:03:02People needed to get somewhere.
00:03:05Among the things that were ruined were streetcars and buses.
00:03:09And, therefore, bicycle extended the range of a person to how far they could pedal.
00:03:19But if you put a little motor on a bicycle, you could go a lot farther, for example.
00:03:24Thank goodness.
00:03:25Looking for something to eat.
00:03:28And we're doing that now.
00:03:31We're doing that now with these e-bikes because e-bikes have really expanded the two wheels in the motor market.
00:03:37And the pedal boosting makes you feel, like, amazingly wonderful.
00:03:42And then we're seeing an explosion in sort of miniature electric motorcycles, you know, little dirt bike.
00:03:50In Japan, motor-assisted bicycles were called ponpons.
00:03:55And to get into the market, Mr. Honda created, first of all, his rather grandly named ā oh, what was it?
00:04:08It was a technical institute.
00:04:11It was a technical research institute.
00:04:14And he and the group of associates ā you couldn't call them employees yet.
00:04:20It was sort of a little premature for that ā bid on a lot of 500 Tohatsu-manufactured generator engines for military radio transmission.
00:04:33And these things weren't terribly good.
00:04:40They could, however, be fairly quickly adapted to power a bicycle.
00:04:47And Mr. Honda made some improvements.
00:04:49Now, the thing about Mr. Honda is that people tend to think of him as a sort of practical madman when he wasn't throwing waiters who failed to satisfy his requirements through the window or wearing overalls to a fancy dress gathering.
00:05:10That he was throwing cylinder heads and shouting at people and making things happen in a big way.
00:05:19But, in fact, he had quite sophisticated knowledge because he was one of those people who took up information like a sponge.
00:05:30So they're looking at this Tohatsu generator engine, and Mr. Honda has made some improvements on it, and they decided they could do better.
00:05:40So they made Model A, which was their first ā actually manufactured their product.
00:05:49And parts that required any precision had to be ordered in from outfits that had the necessary machine tools.
00:05:58One of Mr. Honda's early decisions was we're not going to mess with sandcasting.
00:06:05Sandcasting is a time-consuming process that is suited for small lots.
00:06:14Dyecasting, he saw as the future.
00:06:17The die closes.
00:06:19The metal enters the die.
00:06:22The metal solidifies enough for the die to open.
00:06:26The cycle repeats.
00:06:28Clunk, clunk, clunk.
00:06:30The castings drop onto the conveyor.
00:06:33Now, this showed that he understood that manufacturing cost controls the width of appeal of your product.
00:06:51If you can manufacture the product using large-scale methods that cut costs, your product can reach more buyers because it costs less.
00:07:04And he understood that.
00:07:06Around 1949, when Honda Motor Company was formed, he took on a partner, Takeo Fujisawa, who was a down-to-earth finance man and all-around practical person.
00:07:26And at some point in late 1949, Fujisawa said to Honda, we must start making four-stroke engines because the engines we make sound like they're not running properly and make a terrible smell and smoke.
00:07:46Well, Honda was somewhat taken aback, even offended by this.
00:07:54I can engineer around those things.
00:07:58They're smokeless oils.
00:07:59They're things we can do.
00:08:02Never mind that.
00:08:03Fujisawa wanted four-strokes.
00:08:06And that's how it turned out because by this time, Honda had learned that Fujisawa knew a lot of things that he didn't know.
00:08:19And that's an important thing for partners because if people are fighting each other, it becomes Lincoln's house divided against itself that cannot stand.
00:08:31So, Mr. Honda ordered a new hire, a gentleman who had come on in 1947, I think, Takeo Fujisawa, not Takeo Fujisawa, no, Kiyoshi Kawashima, who would be the second president when Mr. Honda retired.
00:08:58Kiyoshi Kawashima would become president.
00:09:02He was hired straight out of university.
00:09:07I want you, said Mr. Honda, to design a four-stroke engine of better performance than anywhere available in Japan.
00:09:18So, he designed a push rod and rocker overhead valve engine for a market that was mostly buying side valves.
00:09:28And it had much better power.
00:09:36If you trace the flow pattern of air entering a side valve, it has to make a number of right turns.
00:09:43And as the late Kenny Augustine, the airflow wizard, once said, you can make air go fast, you can make air go around corners, but you can't do both at the same time.
00:09:57So, this engine was the E-Type.
00:10:03And it was a considerable success because it made better power than the competition.
00:10:11And it was a better design and better made.
00:10:16Now, Mr. Honda understood that the machine tools that they actually owned in the company were worn out old junk.
00:10:30Because, as you can imagine, Japan was not producing many machine tools in the late 1940s.
00:10:40It takes time to tool up for stuff like that.
00:10:43And while they were improving the E-Type and selling quite a few and were able on the basis of that success to borrow money in business, having credit is of tremendous value.
00:11:06Because if you spend your own money, you're limited to what you could save in your own pitiful, unitary life.
00:11:17And so, in 1954, he decided we need late model, modern machine tools that are designed for high productivity.
00:11:31So, he gets on the Stratocruiser at Tokyo Airport and Haneda at that time.
00:11:43And its four 28-cylinder 4360 engines went into their deep hum and he was whisked away to America and then onward to Europe.
00:11:56And while he was there, he was considerably interested in racing, having, before the war, built a racing car powered by a Curtis OX5 V8 engine, liquid-cooled.
00:12:13And, of course, he took in the Isle of Man TT races.
00:12:20And, of course, he saw that these bikes were tremendously fast, that it was a fabulous contest, and that success in the Isle of Man meant success in the world.
00:12:35That appealed to him.
00:12:37Yeah, that was the biggest race, right?
00:12:40Everybody showed up.
00:12:40And NSU, the German firm, had redesigned their race engines for 1954, and their Renmax 250 twin was making 39 horsepower at something like 12,000 revolutions.
00:13:04Now, Mr. Haneda didn't need a pitch pipe to understand that something very different was going on with NSU than with, for example, the Manx Nortons that won the 500 class.
00:13:17And he realized that these little engines, 250s, were nearly as fast as the 500s by this time.
00:13:33They were creeping up there.
00:13:35And that appealed to him, because he knew that he wasn't going to sell very many 500s in Japan.
00:13:44So, then he went to Europe.
00:13:47He went to Germany.
00:13:48He went to Italy.
00:13:49In Germany, he bought an NSU Supermax.
00:13:52In Italy, he bought one of Mondial's production racer 125 singles.
00:13:59Then, back to Japan.
00:14:04Now, it's all very well to be handed a sheet that says, our engine develops thus and such.
00:14:10You can fold that sheet into a rocket and toss it across the room.
00:14:14It doesn't prove anything.
00:14:16But they put the Mondial on their own dynamometer, and it made 17 horsepower.
00:14:22Now, that was impressive.
00:14:30Now, the ingredients of horsepower, Mr. Honda knew, are displacement, how much air and fuel mixture the cylinder can hold,
00:14:43RPM, and the stroke-averaged net combustion pressure.
00:14:50Well, stroke-average net combustion pressure is referred to as BMEP, break mean effective pressure.
00:15:01And it is a sort of amalgam of cylinder filling, compression ratio, and combustion efficiency.
00:15:10And that had already been improved by Norton, by the British, the makers of British singles.
00:15:22BMEP, for an unsupercharged engine, had been raised to 200 psi, and it hasn't moved much from that point to today.
00:15:33Because the atmosphere has not become any more capable of blowing air into cylinders.
00:15:42And, of course, displacement is a choice that the manufacturer makes.
00:15:48That left RPM.
00:15:50And both NSU and Mondial were principal exponents of making horsepower with RPM.
00:16:01This changed the outlook of Honda Motor Company because it was realized that they could build engines of remarkable power that weren't big and heavy.
00:16:20So, it wasn't long after his return from overseas that they embarked on a twin, the Dream C70.
00:16:39Now, the Dream, Honda Dreams, that I saw in my youth offended me because they looked like they'd come from an old movie.
00:16:54They had the flared fenders that had originated back in the 1930s, and they had leading link suspension in the front, which you imagine trying to move the, give the front wheel a twist.
00:17:11What is going to resist it?
00:17:13Those two little links.
00:17:14Those little dog bones, yeah.
00:17:16Yeah.
00:17:18So, that just looked wrong to me.
00:17:22And a year later, they came out with a C71, which had a 12-volt battery and electric start.
00:17:35Now, this was an obvious change that had been yearning to happen for years and years, but it was prevented from it by, well, what's wrong with starting it with your foot?
00:17:50What are you, man up.
00:17:52It's no problem.
00:17:54And I remember trying to start my 500 single.
00:17:58It was a whole drill you had to go through, pull the compression release, remove the cap from the oil tank, push the engine through numerous times with your foot until you saw.
00:18:09People are getting thirsty.
00:18:12Oh, well, bring the Velocet up here.
00:18:15Uh-oh.
00:18:15Uh-oh.
00:18:16Can't have that.
00:18:17So, what you do, well, what you do with the Velocet, starting a big single, is the oil feed, we crimp on, everyone crimps on a clear hose, and the oil feed to the rockers.
00:18:27And I can tell you that it takes 50 kicks.
00:18:30After it's been sitting, it takes 50 kicks to get oil to show up in that pitiful.
00:18:35It took a lot.
00:18:36It took a lot on my bike.
00:18:38So, this was simply accepted.
00:18:42Well, motorcycles don't have electric start because why would you go to all that trouble?
00:18:48Because it increases the attractiveness of your product.
00:18:55So, from 1957, when the C-70 and 71 appeared, until Harley Davidson, the bastion of manliness, adopted the electric start in 1965, wasn't very long.
00:19:14So, and Mr. Fink, who guided me on a tour of Harley Davidson in the spring of 1966, said, everything Honda has done has increased our sales.
00:19:30So, these twins were nearly ready for world domination, but some more changes were necessary.
00:19:42Honda produced their first CB, the B's indicating a sports motorcycle, CB92.
00:19:53A long ago friend of mine had one in 1963 or so.
00:19:59They were made in 1959 and for a couple of years thereafter.
00:20:04Such a cute little thing.
00:20:06And it was a twin, a 125 twin.
00:20:09And it had electric start that worked.
00:20:16Just press the button and you're running.
00:20:19No big process.
00:20:22Push the button and go.
00:20:25So, they began to manufacture CB72 and CB77 twins.
00:20:36That looked like bigger versions of CB92.
00:20:41They had electric start, 12-volt electrics.
00:20:46And instead of leading link horrors from the past, they had telescopic forks.
00:20:53Now, the humpback gas tank that was such a signature element of those early Hondas.
00:21:04So, the existing literature quotes Mr. Honda as saying that he stood for a long time in front of a statue of the Buddha in one of Japan's many temples.
00:21:18And his wife thought that he'd frozen up somehow, but he's standing there and looking.
00:21:26And he said, the shape of the lines on the side of the tank is the shape of the Buddha's eyebrow, the curve from his eyebrow down to his nose.
00:21:40And he said, well, that's very Japanese.
00:21:44It wouldn't occur to me as a simile.
00:21:48But that was his story.
00:21:51When these bikes, CB72 and CB77, got to the U.S., they were not fully competitive with British twins, but they were very close.
00:22:05I remember having a Zoom across town behind a fellow on a Triumph 500 Daytona, and I was riding a 305 Honda, the CB77.
00:22:19It was close.
00:22:21And contact with the American market quickly did away with the flared fenders and the leading links and all of that other, the trappings of Honda's beginnings.
00:22:36And although people had claimed early on that Honda were copying NSU, copying Horrocks Imperator, which had a very similar, actually, the Imperator engine looks very much like CB350, very much.
00:22:58But it was time passed.
00:23:01So, Mr. Honda addressed this business, these critics.
00:23:08One set of critics was saying, Honda engines turn high revolutions, so they wear out immediately.
00:23:15Don't buy them.
00:23:17Well, he said, if these engines are so poor, why are so many people buying them and then buying them again when a new model comes out?
00:23:27Could it be that they associate high RPM with failure?
00:23:33Because when they try to build for high RPM, they have failure.
00:23:39We know things that they don't.
00:23:42All this time, Honda had his people pushing those foreign-made machine tools harder and harder because production was rising steeply.
00:23:53And they had to discover ways of making those tooling, that tooling, reliable at higher piece rates.
00:24:04And finally, they got into it so deeply that they began to manufacture some of their own machine tools.
00:24:11So, I look on CB350, which came out in 1968 and was produced until 1972, I think.
00:24:25As an Americanized CB77, it had a sort of anonymous-looking but pleasant enough gas tank shape.
00:24:36It had the telescopic fork and the twin shocks in the rear.
00:24:41The cylinders were vertical like a British bike's cylinders instead of sloping forward as on the earlier CBs.
00:24:51So, another thing that interests me a lot about this succession of engines is that CB77, the 305 Honda,
00:25:06was about the same in cylinder filling as the CB350.
00:25:19And they were, the two of them were somewhat behind in cylinder filling from the 1969 design that took over the world, CB750.
00:25:32So, this concept of a two-valve cylinder with a single overhead cam working the valves through rockers was a basic design element which Honda used over and over
00:25:50until they adopted double overhead cams in the case of CB750F and subsequent.
00:25:58So, this was their workhorse during the time of their most rapid expansion into markets.
00:26:10It didn't have those engines.
00:26:12None of those engines had four valves per cylinder.
00:26:16The racers had four valves per cylinder for a specific reason.
00:26:20In order to make a 50cc Honda four-stroke beat the Suzuki two-stroke 50cc GP bike,
00:26:32it had to turn nearly twice the RPM.
00:26:38And they found out how to do that.
00:26:41That was not copied from anyone because there's a long distance from NSU's 12,000 RPM
00:26:49and the Italian 125 singles 13,000 RPM to the 21,500 RPM of the 50cc twin that won the world championship in 1965.
00:27:05Amazing.
00:27:05So, what was going on here?
00:27:10Another big element which Mr. Honda clearly understood because of things that he said at the time
00:27:16is these products must be designed for manufacturing.
00:27:22If we come up with a complicated design that requires a lot of tricky-to-make parts
00:27:29and if their assembly calls for people with three arms and eight fingers on each hand...
00:27:38Lots of shims and all that business.
00:27:40None of that stuff.
00:27:41We just bolt it together and away we go.
00:27:43That's what we need.
00:27:44This was what I noticed when I first took apart a horizontally split Japanese-made engine and it was a Honda
00:27:52is that when you took the case halves apart, all the parts of the engine were laid out in front of you.
00:28:02Kickstart shaft, gearbox output, gearbox input, crankshaft.
00:28:07Yeah, it's like a tray.
00:28:10It's wonderful.
00:28:11Like working on an RD, man, it's all right there.
00:28:14You just take off the top and then put all your bits in.
00:28:19Wonderful.
00:28:20And this thing, you could have the engine completely apart on the bench in under an hour.
00:28:28It was easy peasy.
00:28:30And that was done intentionally because if it comes apart easily, it assembles easily.
00:28:38It never seems that way in real life, Kevin.
00:28:41Well, in real life, you and I are close enough to our first experiences to remember that the first time you do anything is really complicated.
00:28:56And the second time you can't imagine how you thought so.
00:29:00Yeah.
00:29:00So this idea of designing the product so that it can easily be manufactured was something that was noticed by the original designer of Triumph's Speed Twin 500 of 1937, Edward Turner.
00:29:25Edward Turner went to Japan in 1960 and was given, so to speak, the keys to the city.
00:29:34He visited the manufacturers.
00:29:36And of course, he was appalled at what he saw because he saw fast-acting automatic machines making parts at a rate that could not be believed at home.
00:29:49Well, I tell you, when you were talking about Honda investing in machines and building their own machines and making, we're going to die-cast, we're going to do this fast, making all those commitments.
00:30:00I always go back to the Triumph film of the 50s where the guy is sticking the frame in like a coal fire and hitting it with a hammer to straighten the frame out that they've braised.
00:30:12You know, they're braising it together.
00:30:13It's just, it's wonderful.
00:30:17All that manufacturing stuff, Jaguar factory machining engines, Triumph factory machining engines, they just weren't making the same investments.
00:30:25And Edward Turner is there witnessing the future demise and not getting the companies.
00:30:31They had so many opportunities.
00:30:33The British had, they had engines that they designed and they were like, nah.
00:30:41Well, I was going to keep cranking these out, which is an easy trap to fall into if it's working.
00:30:46Mr. Honda committed his company to buying $1 million worth of machine tools on that 1954 trip and they were wondering how they're going to pay.
00:31:01And Mr. Fujisawa came to an understanding with banks.
00:31:07Look, we're going up like a rocket.
00:31:11It might not have been strictly true at that moment, but it soon became true.
00:31:16At one point, Mr. Honda was required, MITI, the Ministry of Industry and Trade or something, international trade and industry.
00:31:30He's filling out these forms and it says, what is your production per month?
00:31:35And he pulled a number out of the air, wrote down $300,000, not long after it was $500,000.
00:31:45It reminds me of that fib, that little fib angle reminds me of talking to Siddhartha Lal, who's in charge of Royal Enfield.
00:31:52He was given Royal Enfield back around 2000 or so, 1999.
00:31:57And he made it his job to bring Royal Enfield back from the brink.
00:32:02And he made all these plans and started modernizing.
00:32:05I interviewed him in India, riding the unit construction engine 500, the new engine, was new manufacturing, all that stuff.
00:32:13So he had made the big changes from 1999, 2000 to 08, where they came out with the new engine that had the beat.
00:32:20You know, it had the single cylinder and, uh, but it had fuel injection, all that really, um, a lot of progress.
00:32:27And he said, uh, we just sat in this room at the factory and he was very, he's a very chill person, obviously very driven and a good thinker and a good leader and all the things that make that company what it is now.
00:32:40But he said to me, this list of things, he says, we have a brand, you cannot buy off the shelf.
00:32:46We have a legacy that you cannot buy off the shelf.
00:32:49Um, we have low cost manufacturing.
00:32:52Um, and we have, I think he said plenty of cash.
00:32:56And so that was, that really, all that stuff stuck with me.
00:33:01I put it in the story that I wrote about that bike.
00:33:03And then I saw him later in India and I was recounting that quote to him.
00:33:08And I said, yeah, you said this, this, and this, and you said, we had plenty of cash.
00:33:11And he's like, oh, and he started laughing and he said, oh, I may have, you know, I may have stretched a little with that one.
00:33:19It was, it was good stuff.
00:33:21We have plenty of cash.
00:33:22Maybe we didn't, but we were getting there.
00:33:23So it's, it's good.
00:33:24You know, while all this technical stuff was going on, uh, in manufacturing and in design, Mr. Fujisawa was selling the product.
00:33:36He wanted to establish a dealer network around Japan and ultimately came up with 13,000 dealers, but he had to iron out some difficulties such as, uh, delayed payments and lack of, uh, appropriate signed agreements and what have you.
00:33:58And he came up with procedures that made it possible to expedite receipt of income and showed Japanese riders that they could go.
00:34:15To a Honda dealership and get a piston or a handlebar lever or any part that was needed for the motorcycle in a systematic way.
00:34:29Not, well, uh, we only make those three times a year and we're coming up for the next batch.
00:34:35So, uh, the 200 manufacturers, of course, steadily dwindled away.
00:34:54A similar situation existed in the U S in the early 1920s.
00:34:59Oh, and it was legendary too, for the massive variety of manufacturers.
00:35:05Oh, yes.
00:35:07And, uh, seems to me that at one point, Mr. Honda said, um, our best tool for taking over the market and becoming number one in the world, which was an early ambition of his.
00:35:26This, this wasn't something that came to him at 4am after they met, we're making 500 a month.
00:35:34Uh, he said, we're going to cut price as our machine tool speed of operation makes possible.
00:35:45And I think in, in, uh, one of the, one of the later years, they put 10 competitors out of business on price because these other firms were not willing to fly Northwest to the U S and buy a million dollars worth of machine tools.
00:36:08They were trying to make, they were trying to make do.
00:36:11It's that saying, the faster you go, the faster you go.
00:36:14So he's.
00:36:15Yes, sir.
00:36:16So, uh, this willingness to take risk seems to be characteristic of a certain kind of business success, but it's also like the dolphin story.
00:36:28Oh, the dolphins, they're the friends of humans.
00:36:31They, they, they guide them to shore and the skeptic says the dolphins guide humans in all directions, but only those who come to shore can tell the tale.
00:36:45That's good.
00:36:46I like it.
00:36:47So sounds true.
00:36:49Yeah.
00:36:50So, um, they basically were better organized and had a better, a more accurate view of how this business would evolve.
00:37:05And an important element, a, a, an absolutely fundamental element was the U S market.
00:37:12Because once Japan market was satisfied, was filled up with product, they weren't just going to say, well, um, it's been fun.
00:37:24Um, where should we retire to?
00:37:28Instead, Mr. Kawashima was sent to the U S to build a dealer network there to make arrangements.
00:37:36And in the early discussions with, uh, American experts, they said, uh, the U S market is approximately 60,000 motorcycles a year.
00:37:49What, what did you have in mind?
00:37:52Well, uh, we were thinking 7,500.
00:37:56Well, that's very good.
00:37:577,500 a year.
00:37:59Let's see.
00:37:59No, no, not 7,500 a year, 7,500 a month.
00:38:06So while products aimed at the U S market were being developed, the U S market was being prepared.
00:38:20Dealers were being signed up, arrangements for shipping and so forth were being written.
00:38:26It all took a tremendous amount of organization.
00:38:30And what does this have to do with the fun of motorcycling?
00:38:34Well, it's just part of the story.
00:38:38That's all.
00:38:39And if you don't like it, you don't have to listen, but I found it fascinating each time
00:38:45in preparing for one of these podcasts, I have delved into a certain area.
00:38:52I have learned so much and I have, what has jumped out at me from the pages of blah, blah,
00:39:01blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:39:31And there was an element of accident in it.
00:39:35Nobody said, pay that money for those machine tools right now.
00:39:39We're shutting you down.
00:39:41Nobody said that.
00:39:42Well, was that because they'd been carefully coddled, taken to dinner, treated in a friendly fashion?
00:39:54We don't know the whole story, but it worked out.
00:39:58And they hired lots and lots of people.
00:40:05They made a policy of hiring graduates from engineering school and putting them straight into difficult and challenging projects.
00:40:17At other companies I could name, the concept was, well, we hire them out of a high school drafting course.
00:40:29If they've done well there, they'll do well with us.
00:40:33And after 10 years of drawing updates on our many parts in production, they understand how we like things to be done and we give them some little projects.
00:40:47Mr. Honda was greatly impressed by the fact that university graduates were uncorrupted by the way it's done.
00:41:01It's very easy to stick with the way it's done.
00:41:09Motorcycles do not have electric starters, but we're going to put electric starters on them and see how you like it.
00:41:16And everyone liked it, except for the stuffiest old stick in the muds.
00:41:22And they keep their own company anyway.
00:41:26Yeah, what an era it was when electric start really started taking over and it was always every road test of, you know, 1972 or where, you know, that whole era.
00:41:36It's like it has electric start, but we're keeping the Kickstarter as a backup.
00:41:40And like almost never, ever needed.
00:41:43But you got to have it.
00:41:44It's got to be there or else, you know, what are we even doing?
00:41:47Well, I remember asking my parents when I was a little boy, why do those cars have that hole underneath the radiator grill?
00:41:58That's where the crank goes if your car doesn't start.
00:42:02Is there a crank in that car?
00:42:04No, probably not.
00:42:05Oh, my MG Magnet had one.
00:42:07I used to start it on the crank for people.
00:42:09Yeah.
00:42:10A tip to all y'all out there who are going to go find a crank start car is don't hook your thumb over the crank.
00:42:16It can open, open, hook it with your finger, you know, like this, with your thumb tucked.
00:42:21Because if it kicks back, it'll possibly remove your thumb or make it hurt quite a bit.
00:42:26Quite a bit.
00:42:27The thing about crank starting a car versus a single like a Velocet, cheers, is you have four opportunities.
00:42:39That's why you don't have to make it such a rigmarole.
00:42:42One of those four cylinders is really close to being in the right position to start when you put your effort into it.
00:42:49Whereas on a single like Kevin was talking about, A, you got to kick it through, make the oil come in, put the cap back on, get it up to compression, move it just past compression.
00:42:58Because then it's in the best possible position to swing around and get the charge in and you have that one cylinder waiting to light off.
00:43:06There was a guy in Jerome, Arizona, there was this kind of junkyard, indoor, outdoor museum, mostly outdoor.
00:43:14He had a running Westinghouse, I think it was a Westinghouse, gigantic stationary engine for a power station.
00:43:22And he would fire that up.
00:43:24It started on compressed air and then it had short little stub stacks.
00:43:29I mean, I'm sure it had some other setup before he got his hands on it, but he was a noisemaker and he would just, he would fire that thing up and start it on air and make blatting noises.
00:43:40He had a huge riding saw.
00:43:42It was the, one of the, one of the only places within, you know, a thousand miles that can process huge lumber where you put the log on the carriage and it moves through the saw.
00:43:53So, uh, it was really something, this story ends with a crank start dirt track Buick.
00:43:59I think it was a straight eight Buick flat track racing car and it had relatively low compression.
00:44:05And he was, you know, wowing all the, all of us up there touring his museum with how he would start that car on the crank and then he would kill it and he would start it again.
00:44:14And I'm like, dude, I can start a Bella set, man.
00:44:18You got eight chances and your compression's like six to one.
00:44:21And I mean, I'm impressed.
00:44:23Don't get me wrong, but.
00:44:24Well, they crank started that, uh, the beast of Turin.
00:44:28Oh yeah.
00:44:29Was it 21 liters?
00:44:31Yeah.
00:44:31A Fiat four cylinder.
00:44:34That's legendary.
00:44:34We'll give a shout out to Goodwood for always doing the good video.
00:44:37And if you've never been to Goodwood revival and all that stuff, you gotta, if you, if you like old stuff, you gotta go.
00:44:43Cause it's vibe that is unequal.
00:44:45It's epic, but they, uh, you can find the beast to turn all over the interwebs.
00:44:50Interwebs.
00:44:50It's pretty wonderful.
00:44:53Because the engine stroke is so long.
00:44:56The driver cannot really see over the hood.
00:45:01It is a monster and it has short stub stacks that barely make it through the engine cover.
00:45:08They're just sticking out.
00:45:10And when it starts, flame shoots out of each stack.
00:45:16It's quite marvelous.
00:45:18Well, uh, this, this Honda affair, of course, um, when everyone had met the nicest people on a Honda and sales were going marvelously.
00:45:34There was a glitch for a time and their market research showed that while you guys haven't been keeping up with what everyone else is doing, people want brighter colors.
00:45:48They want a new look.
00:45:50Oh, oh, oh, sure.
00:45:53Okay.
00:45:54And that was done and it fixed it.
00:45:59But Edward Turner, after his 1960 trip to Japan, in which he discovered, you know, we'll, we can never catch up.
00:46:09That's, that's it.
00:46:10We're finished.
00:46:10He sent his report around to the other manufacturers and they probably didn't read it and they couldn't do anything anyway, because there was no one about to borrow a million dollars to buy machine tools because the stockholders would not have it.
00:46:31What do you mean a million dollars in new machine tools?
00:46:36There was no one there who was saying, yes, but in five years, this will mean this capability to produce this many machines.
00:46:47And if we design the correct ones, such as C100 step through 50 CC, we'll be riding high.
00:46:56They built 300,000 CB350s or very close to it.
00:47:04Remarkable.
00:47:05And of course, as of 2017, 100 million C100s were built.
00:47:16The most produced motor vehicle in the history of the earth.
00:47:22So, uh, from the tiny seed, the mighty oak doth spring.
00:47:31And Honda actually was not a tiny seed.
00:47:35He was quite substantial.
00:47:36And so was his partner, Fujisawa.
00:47:39And between the two of them, they licked the platter clean.
00:47:43And continue to do so in absentia.
00:47:46It's amazing, or it's remarkable what you said earlier about Honda wanting to stick with the two stroke.
00:47:54Yeah.
00:47:55Because his later reputation, probably from that lesson, uh, his later reputation was, I don't really like two strokes.
00:48:01And he was definitely not a turbo guy.
00:48:03He didn't, he didn't seem to want to have, uh, anything to do with turbos.
00:48:07That was the reputation from talking with folks at Honda, you know, when I was first in the business in the nineties, talking to PR and development guys.
00:48:16And you saw them working in Grand Prix racing, trying to make oval pistons and lots of valves work.
00:48:23And then finally.
00:48:26After not winning one point in the Grand Prix race, uh, they parked that bike and replaced it with NS, NS3.
00:48:38Uh, Freddie won two races on it in 1982.
00:48:42Um, when it was introduced, it had 108 horsepower.
00:48:47The competition had 130.
00:48:50And in 1983, Freddie was world champion.
00:48:55And basically, uh, Freddie's bike.
00:49:00Wasn't so abusive of its tires.
00:49:03And Freddie was able to win races.
00:49:07Because the other people tore their tires to pieces in 1982, he won at Spa in Belgium, which is the high speed racetrack.
00:49:16That's where the Moto Guzzi was timed.
00:49:19The V8 at 178 miles an hour.
00:49:25The race came back to Freddie.
00:49:26The fellows went streaking away.
00:49:29And when their tires got tired after 10 laps or so, they were his.
00:49:39And, uh, that bike was, had a two year life.
00:49:44After that, it was four cylinders.
00:49:46And, uh, of course they tried hard with the NR four stroke.
00:49:54Uh, Mr. Honda did not like to avoid a challenge.
00:50:01He decided in the late sixties that he would build air-cooled automobiles and people would like it.
00:50:11The car, the 1300, received excellent reviews from an obedient journalism.
00:50:18But the background was his engineers were going nuts because of the flood of change orders that was coming to the production.
00:50:29And, oh, we have to do this a little bit differently.
00:50:31Oh, we're substituting this part from this part number onward.
00:50:35Um, well, I don't know how we're going to fix this.
00:50:38But rest assured, in a week or two, we'll have it.
00:50:41And finally, a busload of engineers went to see Mr. Honda and they said, please do not destroy the company in this way.
00:50:54We like working here.
00:50:56We enjoy, uh, the work and the challenge, but we believe this car is a mistake.
00:51:02And it's described as a mild response.
00:51:09Who knows if that's accurate, but it's described as a mild response.
00:51:14He said, okay, that's what we'll do.
00:51:18And what project was waiting to replace it just as Honda's three-cylinder two-stroke was waiting to replace the four-stroke oval piston NR500?
00:51:29The Honda Civic.
00:51:33And it took the world by storm.
00:51:36Because instead of waiting for the engine to make a mess and push it out the exhaust port and then trying to clean it up,
00:51:46they went at improving the combustion process so that not as much polluting material was produced in the first place.
00:51:54And this was an approach that, uh, did not have an indefinite future, but it was a wonderful example of a new company with new ideas coming up with new solutions.
00:52:13Uh, so, uh, this was why Mr. Honda wanted to hire lots of young graduates because he felt that a fresh look can be better than years of staring.
00:52:31Comp, uh, compound vortex controlled combustion, CVCC.
00:52:36Whipping it around and making it burn very thoroughly and making it, as you said, clean, clean, clean combustion, not just clean exhaust.
00:52:47Yeah.
00:52:49It's pretty cool.
00:52:50I think of over the years of Honda's engineering mindset, you know, you were talking about Honda observing that the 250s were going nearly as fast as the 500s.
00:53:02And I always, I always think of that at the time of the NSR 500V, where they were looking at the rules and the weight limitations and saying like, Hey, you know what?
00:53:12The, with this twin cylinder 500, like Freddie's three cylinder lighter, maybe we have something.
00:53:19And they, they played with it for a while.
00:53:21It wasn't unsuccessful.
00:53:22It turned out that the line that it had to take through a corner was a corner speed line because it couldn't accelerate as hard as the V4s.
00:53:34But if it could get off the grid first, it could for a time lead the race until its tires began to say, you know, I have some misgivings about this.
00:53:45I'm, I'm not sure I'm going to continue.
00:53:47Formula USA back in the day, I was covering that when I was at Cycle News, I went out to Willow Springs and I was covering Rich Oliver versus Chuck Graves.
00:53:57And of course, Chuck, you know, Chuck's does Graves Motorsports and he was a highly successful racer at Willow Springs.
00:54:03And there's Formula USA and Chuck, Formula USA, you could do whatever you could put, I believe Chuck, certainly one of the races I was covering, he had a GSXR 750 with a 900.
00:54:18I think it was an RF 900 engine in it.
00:54:21So making big juice, a lot of power in a nice light, you know, GSXR 750s of the era were quite light.
00:54:30And, uh, and then he would race against Rich Oliver on a 250 Grand Prix twin.
00:54:36And it's exactly what you said.
00:54:38So Rich couldn't get off the line.
00:54:41And I watched him, you know, Chuck gets off the line because he's got a thousand CC of hopped up, you know, flame throwing four stroke and he can get out of there.
00:54:50And then Rich is riding a different line.
00:54:53He catches up, but he's riding a different line and it's really hard for him to pass.
00:54:57But because the bigger, heavier bike has got all that power, especially at Willow where you're just smoking the right side of your tire, uh, Rich could be like, if I could just squirt.
00:55:08He said this to me, if, yeah, if I could just squirt by, man, I can leave him, you know, because he can ride his line because he's being, you know, he's there, they're intersecting.
00:55:18You're intersecting and he can't do what he needs to do, but I think it was a second race.
00:55:26Rich got out there and he made that pass.
00:55:28He took the flyer and he got out in front and he was able to go just because his tires would last a whole race.
00:55:33Well, um, in current MotoGP, um, Fabio Corderaro on the Yamaha is somewhat down on power.
00:55:48Uh, the bike has to be ridden in a corner speed style because it is engineered for that.
00:55:53He often complains that of this intersecting lines thing and the fact that if he has to drag drag race, uh, a point and shoot bike off the corner, the point and shoot bike always wins.
00:56:09And he says all these things in a very even manner as if I'm really not investing my ego in this operation here because it's been like this for a long time and I've got used to it.
00:56:27The poor man.
00:56:30Racers don't like to be last.
00:56:33Yeah.
00:56:34So this other story, of course, is really a story about manufacturing that, uh, Honda was able to overcome their Japanese competitors by lowering their manufacturing costs until the others could no longer compete.
00:56:54And in business, there's no such thing as slowing down to make a race of it.
00:56:59You crush them.
00:57:00Uh, and, uh, 10 in one year, not bad.
00:57:06So, uh, then there became, there came the, the big, the era of, of marketing and of applying the Alfred E. Sloan theory of vehicle sales, which is start them on the Chevrolet, get them interested in an Olds or a Buick.
00:57:25And soon, if their income rises as you hope it will, you'll have them in the Cadillac, which has a high markup, good business.
00:57:35And people who like to step through C-100, whose, whose little engine made roughly five horsepower at 9,500 RPM.
00:57:50This was Mr. Honda's understanding that RPM is the key factor in getting power from a four-stroke.
00:58:00If you're not allowed to, um, rely on the comfortable old cushion, there's no, ain't no replacement for displacement.
00:58:10Um, that was, that was, that was the key.
00:58:17And now we have, uh, the Japanese majors.
00:58:22Some of them have left California, um, including Honda.
00:58:28Honda, I think that the U S market is, they view it as resting for a while and they're, they've shifted their interest to Southeast Asia where people's incomes are rising rapidly because Southeast Asia is doing what Honda did.
00:58:47They're investing in high production, low cost, low parts cost machine tools, all those little countries.
00:58:56Um, Thailand, um, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the big one, India, they're tooling up and that's what it takes.
00:59:11So, um, story without end.
00:59:17Yeah.
00:59:19Yeah.
00:59:19Your GM progression reminded me of, um, I owned a Cadillac.
00:59:26I owned a 64 Cadillac Eldorado.
00:59:28Actually, we went to lunch in it once.
00:59:30Yes, indeed.
00:59:31I gave it a good squeeze to make a hole in traffic and you just sat back laughing.
00:59:35We were in the top down in Newport beach, the sun was shining.
00:59:38You just started laughing out loud because it was impressive.
00:59:40It had 485 foot pounds of torque.
00:59:43It's something like 1800 RPM.
00:59:45It was the first year.
00:59:48As you said earlier, there's no replacement for displacement.
00:59:50Uh, 420 was the first year for the 429 and they moved the accessories to the front, like the, excuse me, the distributor to the front.
00:59:57They did some things that made it easier to work on.
00:59:59First year for the turbo hydromatic 400, a legendary GM transmission.
01:00:04Absolutely.
01:00:04Uh, and a wonderful car, uh, set it and forget it.
01:00:08Climate control first year for that.
01:00:09It had vacuum tubes and transistors under the dash to control this stuff.
01:00:13It was magnificent.
01:00:15And it was really, yep.
01:00:17One of the greatest cars I've owned about 35 cars, you know, Aston Martins and Jaguars and a lot of foreign jobs, but it's really, it was a wonderfully made car.
01:00:28I think for 1964, it was probably the best made car in the world because it had all of that GM.
01:00:35We got to build it reliably, cheaply, and in huge numbers.
01:00:40Yep.
01:00:41And it was very much like an Impala, you know, all the lines and the dimensions of the car were very much like an Impala, but it was a Cadillac and it had all the different finishes.
01:00:52And how did they make the engines?
01:00:54You know, it was cool that the divisions had their engines, but over, but over at Chevrolet, you know, making a three 50, they had piston groupings of three weights.
01:01:05Yep.
01:01:06And so they would group all the pistons and here's the A group and they could be, you know, it was just a wider range making all those pistons to make the engine as balanced as it could be.
01:01:16And then they put it together and it was pretty nice.
01:01:19Cadillac had five piston groupings to, to narrow it, narrow it down and make a smoother engine, bring it closer to the ideal and looking, yeah.
01:01:28And looking at Honda over all those years, you know, they started, they started with their little step through and they smashed the world with the step through.
01:01:37And then they just started going up and up and up and by, you know, by the time Peter Egan started at Cycle World, circa 79, 78, we were riding CBXs, inline six cylinder, double overhead cam street bikes, liquid cooled GL 1000s, you know, the first gold wing, the first being liquid cooled motorcycle.
01:02:00Remember people say the AMA is terrified that Honda will try to homologate that thing for a super bike, the six, because it had, had little 36 millimeter fork tubes.
01:02:14Yeah.
01:02:15Put those on a 125 now.
01:02:18But the dead hand of the past is always with us.
01:02:23We have to be careful in our thinking.
01:02:27Is this actually true or do I just believe it?
01:02:35So, um, it was grand though, for those people who wanted desperately to have a Honda four in 1969, they could, if they wanted a Honda six, they could.
01:02:47Um, too much is just enough.
01:02:53And of course that could be said for the Cadillac you owned in which I laughed.
01:03:00Yeah.
01:03:01It was, it was a magnificent car.
01:03:04Frost comes so much itself.
01:03:08Yeah.
01:03:08And just so effortless.
01:03:09That was what was great about it.
01:03:11Uh, Peter Egan had a 63 Cadillac and we, we talked about driving those cars and, um, you know, they weren't sports cars, but they were very good handling cars.
01:03:23They were nice to drive on a winding back road.
01:03:25You weren't rushing things, but they were effortless.
01:03:29And that squeeze, that squeeze was just, you just squeeze in the Carter, uh, a, uh, AFB, the aluminum four barrel carburetor that was on it.
01:03:42The number of available and useful adjustments, damping the closing of the throttle plates.
01:03:51You could just zero that thing in so wonderfully.
01:03:55And it just did exactly what you wanted a car to do.
01:03:58You, you just turn the key, starts, idles, settles, you know, idles high, settles in as the choke goes.
01:04:06It was, uh, what a thing.
01:04:09And we, we, it's remarkable that thinking back to 1964 at how backward and basic motorcycles were by comparison.
01:04:20Yes, they were.
01:04:21And today they have all those features.
01:04:24You, you start, there's a high idle.
01:04:28The engine does not stumble.
01:04:30It doesn't ask you, oh, please fiddle with the choke.
01:04:34I'm dying.
01:04:35No, it just sits there.
01:04:37Dum, dum, dum.
01:04:38And over the seconds, as the seconds pass and the intake tracks on the cylinder head warm up, more of the fuel evaporates.
01:04:47The mixture becomes, the mixture becomes rich and the fuel injectors inject less fuel in proportion so that it always seems civilized, smooth and very satisfying.
01:05:01Yeah, new gold wings are out of this world.
01:05:05It is, it is, it is Cadillac of motorcycling.
01:05:08It really is.
01:05:09I don't, I don't at all miss bent choke arm to match this contour.
01:05:15And you're looking at this little tiny writing on this little thing that came with your carburetor rebuild kit.
01:05:22Inevitably, a tiny O-ring or a little steel ball drops on the floor, rolls off the bench.
01:05:28Where did it go?
01:05:30Ah, they're calling me to lunch.
01:05:34Ah, okay, I better go eat because I'm going to need fuel to keep working on this stupid technology.
01:05:42All gone now.
01:05:45Yeah.
01:05:46So much better.
01:05:47Sensors.
01:05:48Well, you know, some of us venture off into the past for entertainment value.
01:05:52Well, it's, it does have entertainment value and it would be nice to go back and, and fix some of those choke pull off problems and actually understand them.
01:06:04But I had to go to lunch.
01:06:05Yeah, I was, uh, you know, I, um, back in the day, I, I thought of myself as motorcycling was purely an athletic, uh, pursuit for me.
01:06:14All I wanted to do was go faster.
01:06:16All I envisioned was looking at photos in cycle world magazine before I worked there and saying, that should be me looking at Freddie Spencer in 1983 and 1985.
01:06:24I can do that.
01:06:26Yeah.
01:06:26I need, I just need a chance and I can do that.
01:06:28And I want to go do that.
01:06:30Um, riding, uh, we have a, a V4, a Ducati V4 S Panigali V4.
01:06:35S here, uh, riding them one thousands, you know, that at this point in life, it is so much motorcycle.
01:06:43They're just supernatural and wonderful.
01:06:45But I have to say, if I'm going road racing, I'm, I'm taking the nostalgic route.
01:06:51I'm going vintage racing and getting a, maybe not a CB three 50.
01:06:55They're popular, but something with a little more displacement to, you know, carry me down the road with a corner exit torque.
01:07:03Stood up for emphasis.
01:07:05Yes.
01:07:07Well, that's it folks.
01:07:08Thanks for listening.
01:07:09Uh, we appreciate your support.
01:07:12Share it with your friends.
01:07:13If you think they'd like it.
01:07:15Uh, this was the evolution of Honda twins and into the future we have seen.
01:07:21Um, yep.
01:07:22Uh, check us out in comments and we'll see you on the next podcast.
01:07:26Thanks for listening.
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