Description
23 Page – PDF Download – Complete Series – Honda CB900F
“Before we strip – some background
The CB900F was one of the last air-cooled Honda fours and probably the best looking of that dynasty. We’ll be starting on the nut and bolts of the DOHC engine next month but first Rosie Marston fills us in with some history.
If you owned a big bike in the late Seventies, odds on it was an air-cooled four. Such was the market domination of this engine type.
As the Eighties approached, the Japanese were reaching the limits of development for this formula with ever larger, more powerful models which made their own innovative designs of only a decade earlier look positively archaic.
So as we blasted around the country in those drought-blighted summers what we didn’t know was that we were on the verge of witnessing the end of the air-cooled era. The R&D men in Japan were already secretly beavering away on designs well beyond our wildest dreams.
It was in this interim period that the Japanese manufacturers brought out model after model, each tweaked a little more, in the never-ending race to stay one step ahead of each other before the new, liquid-cooled era dawned.
From the punter’s point of view, it seemed as soon as the ink was dry on one set of HP forms, the bike was already out of date.
Model History
The DOHC CB900F stepped into this marketplace interlude at a Frankfurt launch in 1978. Despite the fact that it was based on the company’s 998cc RCB endurance racer engine, it wasn’t an awe-inspiring event. The CB900F was perceived as the more down-to-earth version of the Honda CBX six-cylinder machine
The Euro-styled CB900F was introduced with the CB750F and at the same time as the CB650 replacement for the CB550…”
23 Page – PDF Download – Complete Series – Honda CB900F
