The devils in the detail… Honda C70
Here's a bike with an interesting past. They were to be Asia's answer to the moped. An alternative to the popularity of light weight bikes coming out of Europe in the 50's and 60's. What it really was, and now is, went a who lot further. The scooter is now ubiquitous throughout the world. Honda was the first builder off the rank and their first was called the Super Cub. The rest, as they say, is history, a true icon of twentieth century transportation.
Even before you've pulled all the plastic off an old C70 one of the first things to strike you is it's simplicity. It is an extraordinary tribute to those fraternal twins, form and function. Your gonna see a few more coming out of the Bengkel in the coming weeks, we love em!
Before we even began this little project we'd asked ourselves the twenty five dollar question; "What if we put everything, and by that we mean not only parts but of course all the man hours, that we would normally invest into one of our builds, into this little baby?" Rather than leaving that unanswered, we did…
First thing one has to do with the older models, this ones from '76, is to take it from six volt to twelve, what were they thinking back then? The power plant was a little on the lite side so the bore was upped from 70cc to around 100cc, adding power led to us needing another gear. So from three it went to a four speed. Can't live in last century, well then lets add an electric start. Often during the build one change led to having to do another, it seemed to happen quite a lot throughout this build.
Japanese mini switches adorn the BSA bars which are finished with brown gummy grips. To hold the bars on we mounted KLX 150 risers onto a hand machined alloy triple tree. We located an alloy luggage rack, polished it, now it fits in beautifully behind a salubrious custom-made tan leather saddle. Little hand made alloy Deus D decals are mounted either side of the forks and the bengkel boys fitted it out with the sickest pair of leather finished surf racks. Black wrinkle finish to the motor and polished side covers. A K&M filter makes sure she only breaths clean air.
It's taken a long time to get it to this point. Though we feel that it was worth it. We've now got the best little beach hopper in town. Almost an icon wouldn't you say?
