In May of 2023, I was in my final year of university and wasn't sure where life would be headed next. On a whim I booked my CBT at the nearest motorcycle school and 5 months later my cat A license arrived in the post. Over the next year and a half I would own 5 quite different motorcycles but a couple of them gave me some trouble.
The first, a Royal Enfield Himalayan, ate it's inner tube on the rear wheel at 30mph. Once it was back in my garage I tried to replace the rear tube myself which ended in complete failure. The front tire also would not hold its pressure and in the end I got both replaced at the local garage. The second, a Kawasaki Z250 SL, seemed find when I rode it home but over the next few days I found its problem. The front wheel was ridiculously stiff and the culprit was a frozen piston in the front brake. Fortunately, not being equiped with ABS, I was able to overhaul and bleed the caliper with much more success than the previous attempt at the wheel.
This got me wondering - what happens when something more... major goes wrong? Did I even know how my motorcycles work? The answers to those were 'I don't know' and 'Not really'.
That's when, one day, I saw an advert online for a Honda CT90 that was being sold as a project. The idea was simple - one cannot restore a motorcycle without knowing how it works, so if I take this on I'll have to learn. Armed with this aspiration and my modest collection of tools, I bought it and a few days later it joined my other bikes in the garage.
The following posts will describe where I started from, where I went from there, and what I'm up to these days. I hope that anyone else who is as inexperienced as I was may find it interesting to see how the whole thing went. If all goes well and the little Cub gets back on the road, I have an exciting trip planned for it, but detail on that can come later.