The Honda CT90 has an interesting folk tale of a creation story: Honda America’s first sales manager, Jack McCormack (who would go on to create the American Eagle line of bikes) noticed that a Honda dealership in Boise, Idaho was selling more Honda 50cc bikes than all 6 dealerships based in Los Angeles. The Boise dealership had swapped out the street tires for knobbies, put in a larger rear sprocket, and marketed it as a trail bike for farmers. Honda America sent one of these examples back to corporate, and the CT bikes were born.
The 1968 model was the key to Honda’s success with the CT bikes. Other companies had developed similar dual sports, but they required you to get off the bike and manually switch sprockets, depending on if you wanted highway cruising or trail crawling abilities. Honda advanced the game by replacing the secondary sprocket with a reduction spur gear, giving high and low ratios on the fly. While you still had to get off the bike to switch between hi/lo, it was now a much easier process. The 8 horsepower powerplant was the same out of the Honda S90, but nearly everything else was well-built for dual-sporting. The price of entry was just $330, a relative bargain compared to the competition. The one exception was the leading link suspension, which was immediately replaced by normal forks as shown in this 1969 model. Other features specific to the ’69 bike are the airbox and the speedometer.
The seller of this bike gave it a “complete frame-up restoration with frame, tank and other yellow parts powder coated to closely match original yellow with reproduction decals applied to original locations.” The rims were replaced with NOS units as the originals were too rusty – other new parts include the wheel bearings, tires, tubes, seat cover, foam, all cables, and the mirrors. Everything is said to work, though the speedo is optimistic. The bike got a mechanical restoration with a rebuilt top end, bored out cylinder (now displaces 105cc), Beatrice Cycle high performance cam, rebuilt carb, and more. It’s also got 50% stiffer fork springs and 2x stiffer shock springs.
It’s a great listing with great photos, and the seller’s even got a video that has much higher production quality than the usual “start it up and walk around it”:
Find this CT90 for sale in Newark, Delaware for $3,000 here on ADVRider (registration required).