Do you enjoy tackling a difficult challenge? If you’re the type of person who laughs in the face of doing things the easy way, then the most recent restoration video from YouTube channel Live with Creativity may just be for you. Restoration? Actually, no—more like rustoration.
It’s a 1970s Honda C70 that he’s pulled from the scrap heap this time, and it’s one of those bikes that’s probably more rust than solid metal. Finely aged cheese with this many holes in it might be fine (and even delicious), but it’s generally not what you want to see when you’re contemplating a vintage bike.
While it’s certainly true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that there’s frequently no sense in trying to talk logic to someone in love—especially if it’s a bike—there comes a point when you must question whether a project is beyond hope. At the beginning of this video, when LWC is pulling this bike out and into frame for the first time, I think anyone viewing this video is probably reaching that point.
However, none of us is LWC, and LWC knows what he wants to do. If someone says it can’t be done, he’s going to do it—and more power to him, because it’s amazing to watch. As usual in a restoration, everything has to come apart, get cleaned up, get repaired, get protected (with anti-rust treatments/powder coating/paint/etc.), and get put back together.
Just listing out the basic steps like that makes it seem far simpler than the process is. It’s never that straightforward, and especially not with a machine that’s in as bad a shape as this one starts out. The engine thankfully isn’t awful, considering its age. Even the inside of the carburetor looks surprisingly good, considering.
However, every external bit of this bike is rusted, bent, broken, or otherwise mangled in some way. Still, LWC manages to salvage most of it—even if it means taking apart a couple of spare motorcycle fenders he had sitting around so he can weld solid pieces of metal into the slices that the rusty Swiss cheese he removed had previously occupied.
Some pieces of metal, like the leg shields, require extensive hammering to bang back into something that even begins to approximate the original shape that left the Honda factory. All in all, it’s an impressive amount of labor, all sped up and stitched together into a video that’s a little over 41 minutes long.
For do-it-yourself types, inspiration is everywhere—but some inspiration is a little stronger. This video fits in that category for sure. You may want to bookmark it for a rainy day after watching, just in case you need a little boost next time one of your own projects is getting you down.
