Sometimes the universe is a strange web of coincidences. After watching Fincher’s reworking of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I left the theater asking myself, “What was that stripped-down bike she was riding?”  I forgot to look it up afterwards as I got caught up in conversation and then life. At the time I saw the movie I was all jazzed up about finding an old BSA or Norton to turn into my Cafe Racer Project. Over the course of a few weeks and many conversations with people that know a whole lot more about bikes than I do, I was convinced that while BSA and Norton made great looking bikes, unless you know how to routinely work on them you will find them to be nothing but problems, and the push was made for me to start with a Japanese bike, like Honda. I ended up with my 1971 Honda CB350 and got to work stripping it for the rebuild, which you can see in earlier posts in this blog. While searching for inspiration for the final build I kept searching for 1971 CB350’s. I found some great examples, which I have also been posting. Yesterday I searched on the simple phrase CB350 Cafe Racer and “Boom!”, out jumped the bikes built for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which it turns out are 3 late 1960’s Honda CL350 Scramblers built by a shop in LA called Glory Motor Works.

You can read about the builds and the project on BikeExif, at Return Of The Cafe Racers, or on Coop666’s Flickr Page.

There are so many similar elements on this build to what I had in mind that I can’t get over the coincidence.

Time to get back to my build…