Incredible job of combining essential Honda history with sterling journalistic style. Not many folks know that ’60s is not 60′s.

Born in ’51, my initial introduction to Mr. Honda’s alloy marvels was in 1962 or 1963. I didn’t know the model at the time; I will never forget when I heard my first CL72, with open exhaust, staccatoing (Is that a word? it is now.) down the street in front of me.

I worked in a Honda dealership from ’72 to ’83. We had cards of Suff-or-Nots on the parts counter. I installed many and replaced a bunch that endured one too many exhaust strokes.

I think it’s perfectly ‘legal’ (and I think Soichiro would posthumously agree with me) to install these parts in an otherwise museum-quality resto.

They are as much culture as part.

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Goose

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The point of this thread is the Honda 350. The bike was slow, heavy, didn’t handle that well and you saw one on every corner. Yes, it was cheap and reliable but that didn’t make it cool.

What we can agree on is that any bike is better than no bike. That is where the Honda 350 fit in my life, it was the best bike I could afford. It beat walking or my 10 speed by a mile. Then I got more cash and found better bikes.

As to Mr. McQueen, you’re right he probably wouldn’t have chosen any of the bikes I mentioned but I can easily see him on an X-6, a Mach III or an RD350, visualizing him on a CB350 is difficult for me. Try it yourself.

Finally, I’d like to say I think Gabe make a cafe bike out a CB350 is a fun idea, it shows what you can do with enough work. He is taking a two wheeled sow’s ear and turning it into silk purse. Personally, my first choice from this era would have been a CB500/ 550-4 (followed by a CB450, never rode but always liked) but he is showing you can make almost anything in to a cafe bike with enough effort.

Goose

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Here’s the article with pics: http://blog.cycleworld.com/2011/03/to-snuff-or-not-to-snuff%E2%80%94by-steven-l-thompson/

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Good to hear about your CL350,with the mods you did to it. All this talk about this era has me thinking about Snuff-or-Nots. Are you familiar with them? Here is an article I recently came across about them:

“Say it’s the summer of 1964 and you’re 17 years old, living in a California suburb, and you’ve saved enough money from your job working at the local Mobilgas station to buy a Honda 305 Scrambler—the CL77 that every moto-minded teenager in America seemed to want and a whole lot got. Once you had the thing, you bought and installed the most vital components any self-respecting CL rider could buy: Snuff-or-Nots.

For the historically minded, the important questions regarding Snuff-or-Nots are: What were they, who invented them, where and when?

For the practically minded who remember them fondly, the only important question is: Can I still get some that will fit my restored Honda Scrambler?

And for the obsessive restorer who wasn’t around then, the question is: Why would I install Snuff-or-Nots instead of keeping the pipes and muffler stock?
First things first: Allan N. Lader of Gresham, Oregon, applied for the patent on Snuff-or-Nots on November 5, 1964, and got the patent on October 10, 1967. A computer programmer back when computers understood Fortran and took up entire climate-controlled rooms, Lader was also a keen on-and-off-road rider who disliked having to put in and take out exhaust baffles—or what he calls “snuffers”—on his four-stroke dual-purpose bikes for different riding environments.

The fix, Lader thought, would be what amounted to a flat washer that could be pivoted inside the exhaust pipe to silence the exhaust or turned edge-on to allow it to flow freely, depending on whether the bike was on- or off-road. Doing most of the test riding on his Ducati 250 Single, he invested two years and some $8000 of his own money (more than $57,000 today) to create, develop and test it before even trying to manufacture what became the Snuff-or-Not.

Being market-savvy and about a decade older than the first wave of the Baby Boomers, he read the tea leaves correctly when Honda’s ohc twin-cylinder Scramblers started selling in serious numbers. Lader sold more than 100,000 Snuff-or-Nots in the first year of manufacturing at $1.95 each (retail—and Twins, of course, needed two), through Pacifico, the company he co-owned with his brother, Randy.

Because of the significance of Allan Lader’s Snuff-or-Nots, when my buddy, Paul Adams, called me from John Proto’s shop—Performance Cycle, in Diamond Springs, California, in the Northern California Sierra Nevada foothills—to say that John’s son, Matt, had unearthed a New-Old-Stock (NOS) Snuff-Or-Not from Proto’s parts bin, I wasted no time in getting up there to look at it.

You can still find NOS Snuff-or-Nots on eBay, but they’ll cost a lot more than $1.95 each these days, and they’re getting rarer. So, the answer to the second question is: Yep, you can still find them.

But the third question, about whether a restorer ought to depart from showroom-stock in bringing a now nearly half-century-old Honda Scrambler back to life is not easily answered. There were shops back in the day that wouldn’t even work on a bike with Snuff-or-Nots. Joe Bolger, legendary AMA Hall-of-Fame scrambles and MX racer, inventor and former Honda shop owner, reminded me of this when I asked him if he’d ever installed any. On the other hand, Carl Cranke, another AMA Hall-of-Fame member and my high-school classmate (Bella Vista, in Fair Oaks, California, ’66), told me that when he worked at and raced for a Honda shop, he installed what seemed like thousands of them. Carl had a fast Super Hawk with factory-look megaphones, but it seemed like every other bike we ran across in those days was a Honda Scrambler with Snuff-or-Nots, often left in the “open” position so we could all savor Mr. Honda’s contributions to the sounds of the Sixties. There are YouTube videos available for those who’ve never heard that unique sound signature, but they don’t really capture the high-rpm snarl emitted by those sweet-looking upswept pipes.

Allan and Myra Lader say that they sold Snuff-or-Nots mainly through small magazine ads. Gene Rocchi’s Rocky Motorcycle Parts and Accessories was their primary distributor from their first year through the end of the Scrambler era—say, early ’70s, after the Yamaha DT-1 had triggered a ferocious battle between the Japanese Big Four in the dual-purpose market and rendered those Scramblers yesterday’s news. Some people think that Honda essentially created that market with the enormous success of its 250 and 305 Scramblers in the mid-’60s, giving all sorts of riders the opportunity to wander off the pavement, where they’d twist the Snuff-or-Nots to wide-open and then roost along the dirt and gravel of an America that hadn’t yet been gated and “protected” against, well, us.
That America is long gone, but Snuff-or-Nots are still with us. With luck and enough restorers brave enough to replicate the rides as they were really when they and dual-purpose riding was new, they always will be.

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