Welp...here we go again...2004 Honda Shadow

Darkrider · 08-10-2021, 10:31 PM

As mentioned in the What did you buy thread...i ended up trading my jeep for this thing.

It does need a bit of work but it is able to be ridden as is once i put in a new battery and fuel petcock. Kind of realized last night that i would not get to the Jeep right away given i have the '69 F250 and '73 MGB ahead of it in my to get done list. So off it went to spike..who ironically enough is the former owner of the MGB. Him and i have traded vehicles back and forth a few times over the years. So more then likely the S10 Blazer or Jeep will eventually boomarang back to me from him in the future.

Biggest things that the Shadow needs are:

new battery
fuel petcock
on/off ignition switch
rear brake light

rear brakes converted to the mechanical Honda brake to the Chevy hydraulic brakes.

I plan on replacing the rear cargo carrier behind the seat with a filler plate and a Fat 50 ammo can as a lockable trunk. The filler plate will make it easier to fit a trailer type tail light to the back of it as a brake/tail. The rear tires will be covered by trailer fenders and more then likely i will sort out some method of attaching a hitch to the rear diff much like an ATV to pull a small utility type trailer. As for the brake conversion i have figured out that i should be able to use a Harley Sportster or similar rear mounted brake master cylinder with a custom linkage rod from the Honda brake pedal to operate the rear brakes. The plan there is to mount the master cylinder in place of the rear passenger foot pegs that are unneeded anyway as there is no passenger seat. The rear axle itself is originally from a 1984 or 1986 (cant remember the exact year of the donor) Chevy Chevette. There are currently no brake parts inside the drums so i will have to rebuild the complete system from scratch which is not a bad thing really. It turns out that the Chevette used a torque tube style rear driveline which made it easy to adapt to the Honda once it was narrowed to be centred properly on the bike. He did the conversion in such a way i could literally take another Honda Shadow rear swing arm and drive shaft and take the bike back to being two wheels with it all being a bolt on swap back and forth. The Chevette master cyl had a 7/8" bore for all 4 brakes and the Harley part is a 5/8" bore. But since it is also going to be a lot closer to the rear end and only running the rear brakes the difference in bore size is probably going to be a non issue or at least not enough of one to worry about.