Post
by piecutter » Mon Oct 23, 2006 2:38 pm
The "bonehead" behind the counter may be being noncooperative, but unless he's a vintage Honda enthusiast, he genuinely does not know about the repro badges. They were a private venture by another enthusiast, and have never been made available through standard powersports industry channels. I suspect he hasn't produced any in a while, seeing as how they are so hard to find, and when you do find them the price seems to have increased exponentially. Supply and demand dictates that they will sell for what the market will bear. Sooner or later Jay Leno will take on a CB72 project and that fellow that's been sitting on the that last set will probably sell them for much more than $550. Honestly, I've thought about repro'ing them myself, seeing as they have the highest "perishibilty to availability" ratio of any other part that we deal with here, but if you take a few things into account, it's not cost effective. It's actually a pretty complicated production process with lots of easy to screw up steps. Add in the actual size of the market, (if you're on this forum, you've pretty much seen the biggest part of it!) and then read up on Honda's latest copyright infringement suits, (yes, they have followed the American path of "LogoNazism" along with HD) and it all comes down to having lots of money and time to go through approval to make a product that you pretty much HAVE to price beyond the project budget of most of the enthusiasts here.
I kinda wish I had gone ahead and paid the $135 for the set the first time I saw them.(Yeah, that was a WHILE ago.) Unless I win the lottery, you're probably not gonna see 'em reasonably priced anywhere.
I gotta look at it this way, I have one bike with the metal badges, and one with factory original plastic ones. Those plastic ones, even with all their internal cracks and other signs of age, I wouldn't trade 'em for nice clean repro's if you paid me. To me they are a kind of symbol of achieving a certain echelon in this hobby, the difference between having a nice example of a vintage Honda, however shiny and rust free, and having one I would put in show. Yeah, you see one in the line up every now and then that has the potmetal badges, but it always has that stigma. It's cool, especially when there's no other present to out class it. They even win trophy's. But that emblem is just staring you in the face, like some tin sherriff badge from the bottom of a box of Sugar Pops, its gonna eat at you til you find the real thing.
Hey, if everybody could find a nice Aston Martin DB5 that they could afford, well, would you really want one then? No. They'd be like <blank>'s. Every yahoo that thought he was something would be driving one, which is kinda great, because you get to see who has no car sense whatsoever without even looking. I don't want to rag on <blank>'s to much, 'cause I already know some of you are driving <blank>'s. No offense, please. Just don't post any more pictures of <blank>'s cause no one is impressed but you.
Hope you have enjoyed this, I know I have. I probably should actually be doing some work around here, though. You know, lead by example?
Thanks!
Joe
