1979 Honda XL500s – Page 4 – Not Your Average Engineer

On Sunday, Drew and I went on an adventure on our dual sports into the central Oregon coast range. Our twin goals were Valsetz and Valley of the Giants. We made it to within two miles of Valsetz before we were flagged down by a state trooper. Evidently motorcycles have recently been banned from the forests even though cars and trucks are still allowed. We are investigating the matter further to see if we can get special written permission to travel on forest roads. The whole central coast range is inside a Cooperative Travel Management Area. It would have been nice if the signs we passed had mentioned motorcycles being disallowed. The trooper gave us a warning and shooed us out of the forest. We are now researching new places to ride or ways around the regulations so that we can get our dual sports some more exercise.

This video has a few clips of some of the more memorable sections of road that we ventured across.

Elevation profile. The dip in the middle is where the state trooper turned us around.

Route map. Note that it’s difficult to get a good GPS lock in the forest. It’s even harder when in deep ravines.

This was a spectacular place to ride.

Spare can of fuel.

Now where are we?

We are here.

We almost explored up this road.

Gorgeous country.

Valsetz is down there somewhere.

Microwave relay station.

Why yes, we are on an adventure.

Yesterday I purchased a 1979 Honda XL500s from Craigslist. The people I purchased it from were very nice. The bike spent most of its life in Toledo and Newport. There is some surface rust but the bike is generally sound. I believe that I will need to do a little work to the compression release mechanism (don’t know the proper name yet) that ties to the kick starter and prevents kickback. It’s hard work kicking over a 500cc single banger without that pressure relief valve.

The bike has just shy of 7000 miles on it. Not too shabby for a 32 year old bike. This is a full drum brake bike. No disks here. It stops just fine but will suffer from brake fade if more than two panic stops are made in a row. There are options to upgrade to disk by swapping the forks to a more modern set. I might do that in the future depending upon how much I like this bike as-is.

The (6 volt!) battery is shot. My buddy Drew has a spare battery from his Honda XL185 conversion project (throwing in a Lifan 200cc engine) that I will be swapping in. I am going to have to track down a 6 volt trickle charger to keep the battery topped up.