CL 77 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

That’s me, age 15, in the photo above. I’m on my Dad’s Honda Super Hawk, and no, I wasn’t getting ready to do my best impression of Rollie Free or Walt Fulton (even though I was apparently wearing the same swim trunks as ol’ Rollie). I wasn’t getting ready for a high speed run at all…it was summer, and we spent a lot of time in the water in those days. And when Dad said it was okay (and sometimes when he didn’t), I rode the Super Hawk in the fields behind our house.

We didn’t know as much about photography back in the mid-’60s. But you get the idea. That Super Hawk was a lot of fun. That’s me in the summer of 1966.

Rollie Free at Bonneville in 1948, on his way to a romping 150.313 mph land speed record. Check out the swim trunks.

Walt Fulton breaking 100 mph in 1952 at El Mirage, California, on a Mustang motorcycle.

The Honda fascination started with me as a 13-year-old kid. We weren’t motorcycle people. Yet. I was mesmerized by a ’64 Triumph 500cc Tiger a guy at school owned. That started a slew of snail mail requests to the motorcycle companies (snail mail was all we had back then, but we never felt communications deprived), and pretty soon I had a collection of moto sales literature. Dad started looking at it. Then we saw a Honda Dream at a McDonald’s (I wrote about that a few blogs back). A short while later, Dad’s trapshooting buddy Cliff Leutholt (one of those nicest people who rode a Honda) visited us on his Super Hawk. Jet black, chrome, silver paint, twin carbs, electric start, it was stunning. Cliff said it was good for 100 mph. Dad rode it (a first for my father) and he was hooked. The 1960s were good times.

Me, with Dad’s CB 160, in February 1966. No snow, but it was cold that time of year in New Jersey.

The bug bit hard. Dad started looking at the classifieds (remember those?), and in 1965, he bought the Baby Super Hawk, a scaled down, 160cc version of the 305. Dad owned that bike for only a few months, and then he traded it in on a Super Hawk. Sherm Cooper (of Cooper’s Cycle Ranch) offered Dad $450 for the 160 against the Super Hawk’s $730 (it was $50 more than Dad had paid for the 160), and just like that, we had a Super Hawk. Boy, that was a blast.

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The Honda Super Hawk emerged from a vibrant and dazzlingly successful Honda Motor Company. Honda first brought its motorcycles to the US in 1959, and, well, you know the rest. 1961 saw the creation of the 250cc Honda Hawk, which quickly evolved into the Super Hawk. The Super Hawk bumped displacement to 305cc, and its 180-degree parallel twin was good for 28 horsepower at 9200 rpm (unheard of engine speeds back in the early 1960s). The Hondas had 12-volt electrics, twin 26 mm Keihin carbs, a single overhead cam, a 4-speed transmission, and a wet sump lubrication system.

Like the Honda Dream in our recent blog, the Super Hawk had an electric starter, along with a kickstarter that oddly rotated forward (it was hard to look like Marlon Brando kick starting a Super Hawk, but I did my best). The instrumentation was a cool touch. Instead of the more conventional (i.e., British) separate cans for the tach and the speedo, both were contained in a single panel atop the headlight. The Super Hawk had a tubular steel frame and front forks, but no front frame downtube (the engine was a stressed member). The electric starter occupied the space where front downtube would be. It was a clever engineering solution and that electric starter made life easier, but the Super Hawk didn’t look as cool as the 305cc CL 77 Scrambler (more on the Scrambler in a future blog).

The Super Hawk was a runner. A road test in Cycle World magazine had the top speed at 104.6 mph and the bike ran a respectable 16.8-second quarter mile at 83 mph. Super Hawks had twin leading shoe front brakes (something special in the pre-disk-brake era). The motorcycle weighed 335 pounds. The Super Hawk could be had in the same blue, black, white, or red color choices as the Honda Dreams, but unlike the Dream, all the Super Hawks had silver frames, side covers, and fenders. I remember that nearly all Super Hawks were black; it was very unusual to see one in any other color unless you were an Elvis fan.

The Super Hawk had good starring roles, too, before product placement became the mega-industry it is today. There were pop songs about Hondas. Elvis Presley rode a red Honda Super Hawk in the 1964 movie Roustabout. And a fellow named Robert Pirsig rode across the US on one with his son and wrote a book about it (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance); that book has become something of a bible in the travelogue and motorcycle deep think genres. Pirsig’s Super Hawk currently resides in the Smithsonian.

So, back to my early days and my turning Dad into a rider: As awesome as the Super Hawk was, it didn’t last long. The progression back in those days was a small Honda, a bigger Honda, and then (before the advent of the Honda CB 750 Four), a jump to a Triumph or BSA. Dad had been bitten by the bug big time, and in 1966, he bought a new Triumph Bonneville. But that’s a story for another blog.

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Our previous blog on the Honda Dream is here. And here’s our blog on riding a Honda Scrambler in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens: Jerry and the Jersey Devil.

My Dad and I saw our first Honda ever in 1964 at a McDonald’s in East Brunswick, New Jersey. It was a 150cc Dream, the smaller version of the bigger CA 77 305cc Dream. I was 12 years old at the time. In those days, it was a fun family outing to drive the 20 miles to Route 18 in New Jersey and have dinner at McDonald’s (that was the closest one), where hamburgers were 15 cents and the sign out front said they had sold over 4 million of the things. And the Honda we saw that day…Dad and I were both smitten by the baby Dream, with its whitewall tires, bright red paint, and the young clean cut guy riding it. True to Honda’s tagline, he seemed to be one of the nicest people you could ever meet (although admittedly the bar wasn’t very high for nice people in New Jersey).

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Dad and I started looking into Hondas, and that included a trip to Cooper’s Cycle Ranch near Trenton. Back then, it really was a ranch, or at least a farm of some sort…the showroom was Sherm Cooper’s old barn. The little Hondas were cool, but the big ones (the 305s) were even cooler. A 305 was the biggest Honda available in the mid-1960s and Honda imported three 305cc motorcycles to America: The CA 77 Dream, the CB 77 Super Hawk, and the CL 77 Scrambler. The Dream was not designed to be an off road motorcycle (that was the CL 77 Scrambler’s domain) or a performance motorcycle (in the Honda world, that was the CB 77 Super Hawk).

Of the 305 twins, It’s probably appropriate to discuss the CA 77 Dream first. The Scrambler and the Super Hawk were intended to appeal to motorcycle enthusiasts; the Dream was a much less intimidating ticket in (into the motorcycle world, that is). The typical Dream buyer was either someone stepping up from a smaller Honda, or someone who had not previously owned a motorcycle.

Honda first used the name “Dream” on its 1949 Model D (a single cylinder, 98cc two-stroke). No one knows for sure where the Dream moniker came from, but legend has it that someone, upon first seeing the Model D, proclaimed it to look like a dream. The C-series Dreams first emerged in Japan in 1957. Pops Yoshimura built Honda engines with modified production parts that ran over 10,000 rpm for 18-hour endurance races, proving the basic design was robust. Some say Honda based the engine design on an earlier NSU engine, but Honda unquestionably carried the engineering across the finish line. Whatever. When’s the last time you saw an NSU? Another big plus was that Honda used horizontally split cases and that (along with vastly superior quality) essentially eliminated oil leaks. The other guys (and in those days, that meant Harley and the Britbikes) had vertically split cases and they all leaked. Honda motorcycles did not, and that was a big deal for a motorcycle in the 1960s.

There were several differences between the Dream and the other two Honda 305cc motorcycles. The Super Hawk and the Scrambler had tubular steel frames and forks; the Dream used pressed steel for both its frame and fork. The Dream was a single-carb motorcycle; the Super Hawk and the Scrambler had twin carbs. The Dream had large steel valanced fenders, the other Hondas had more sporting abbreviated fenders. The Dream was the only 305 that came from the Honda factory with whitewall tires. The Dream had leading link front suspension; the Scrambler and the Super Hawk had telescopic forks. The Dream used the Type II crankshaft (so did the Scrambler) with a 360-degree firing order (both pistons went up and down together, but the cylinders fired alternately). The higher performance Super Hawk had the Type I, 180-degree crankshaft. Like the Super Hawk, the Dream had electric starting (the Scrambler was kick start only). The Dream came with a kickstarter, too, but why bother? I mean, you weren’t going to be mistaken for Marlon Brando when you rode a Honda Dream.

The Dream’s 305cc engine had a single 23mm Keihin carb and it produced 23 horsepower at 7500 rpm (not that the rpm was of any interest; the Dream had no tachometer). With its four-speed transmission and according to magazine test results, the Dream was good for between 80 and 100 mph (depending on motojournalist weight, I guess). The Dream averaged around 50 mpg, although in those blissful days of $0.28/gallon gasoline, nobody really cared. Honda Dreams came in white, black, red, or blue. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had bought one in each color and parked them in the garage. My favorites were black or white; those colors just seemed to work with the Dream’s whitewall tires.

Honda built the Dream until 1969. The Dream retailed for $595 back in those days, but a shrewd negotiator could do better.

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