Written by Martin Hodgson.
For nearly 30 years the Honda CX500 cruised the highways and byways of the world as a poor man’s cruiser, for those who couldn’t shell out the bucks for a Harley Davidson but still wanted the bars up style and the V-Twin heart beat. Then in the last ten years some clever folks around the world took the odd ball Honda, so ugly it was known as the ?Plastic Maggot? and started turning them into a stunning line up of customs that just keep getting better. Enter Mathieu Renaud of Mr Motorcycles in Montreal who picked up this 1979 Honda CX500 Custom for the bargain price of just $1000 (Canadian) and put his years of experience in aeronautics into creating one of the cleanest and well put together CX customs we’ve ever seen.
Mat is not the first aeronautical engineer to be involved in a CX500 build, in fact the designer of the CX500 was Shoichiro Irimajiri an aeronautics master who spent more than 20 years at Honda designing F1 engines, the legendary CBX 6 cylinder and of course the plastic maggot. He was given a blank canvas for the CX project and rather than stick with an inline four engine that was becoming the dominant unit of the period he bucked the trend creating a water-cooled, shaft-driven, V-twin mounted like a Moto Guzzi. At the time Honda had never produced a V-twin, had only once used a shaft drive and to keep things interesting Irimajiri opted for pushrods over overhead cams and rotated the heads 22 degrees so the ...