Honda Trail 70
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Honda Trail 70 |
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Welcome to Honda Mini Trails of Minnesota |
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| Our story starts off with our dad (Rod) looking through the Duluth Newstribune and telling us that there is a 1970 Honda Trail 70 in the paper for $110. He called on the bike and asked the guy a bunch of questions and then he told us about it. The bike was in perfect shape. We had no idea what it was until we saw some pictures of our dads bike in an old photo album from when he was a kid. We instantly wanted it! Our mom would not let us get it because she said there was no place to ride it and that we were too young. Well from then on we really wanted to get a bike but after we passed up that first bike it seemed tough to find a bike. We looked at the local Honda dealer and they had a 1986 Z50 and we fell in love with that bike. We liked the CT-70 but when we saw the Z50 it seemed like it would be easier to ride. At the time the price was way to high for us,$649. | ||
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Well we would hope and dream day in and day out that we would find a Z50 or CT-70 for the next few years. We placed adds in our local paper wanting to buy bikes and we only had one call. A guy wanted to sell us an atrocious pile of CT-70's, 3 bikes total but if you were lucky you could have maybe made a 1/2 a bike out of what was there. This was 1990 and he wanted $300 for the junk! We had been looking for so long that our dad said if we wanted the bikes he would get them for us. We felt that if we were going to get a bike it had to be nice so we had to pass Well we kept looking everyday, that included going up to the paper boys house at 6am to get the paper, just in case a bike was in the paper. We wanted to be the first to call. | |
| It would not be until the summer of 1991 before we got our first bike. One day our uncle Bill told us to come up and try out his new riding law mower (to most kids it would seem like work, but to us it was like riding a Go-Kart) so we went to check it out. It seemed like fun until Bill's neighbor Fred rolled into the driveway on a Z50 hardtail. It was a blue frame, red tank, black grip and a white throttle grip bike? Once we saw the Z50 we wanted to get that law mower back in the garage! We rode that Z50 up and down the farm rode all afternoon. The bike had no brakes, well we didn't need brakes because we didn't want to stop anyway! We wanted to buy the bike from Fred and he didn't say anything so we kept riding. Later that night we found out that Fred said we could have the bike! We were so happy that we finally got a bike even if it wasn't in the greatest shape. A month later we were looking at our local Honda dealer and we noticed there was a lime green CT-70 in the repair shop and it was a great looking bike. We looked at the name and we did not | ||
| recognize the owner but we hoped it was for sale. Well a couple weeks later we were at our Grandparents house waiting for our parents to get back from their trip and we happened to pick up a paper and see that there was a CT-70 for sale. It was early night time so we figured the bike would be sold. Our dad called on it and the kids said they still had the bike and it was a lime Green 1975 bike. We asked their last name and they said it and it hit home! We knew that it was the bike we saw at the dealership! We told them that we would buy it without looking at it! We got the bike the next morning, and have had it ever since. Now that we both had a bike to ride things were going great. Then one day we met | ||
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up with a guy that said he had a mini bike in his Volkswagon Rabbit. When he pulled it out it was a 1971 blue Z50A K2. A nice bike for $90. We thought the bike ran when we got it but we could not get it to go. We brought the bike up to the Honda dealer to get it fixed and they said it would cost more then the bike was worth?? Well to this day they still think a perfect hardtail is worth $150. We brought the bike back home and decided to take all the good parts and make one nice bike. That fall Chad was out riding the lime green CT-70 and he spotted | |
| a guy that had a nice Gold 1971 CT70 and he said he would sell it and we ended up bringing it home. Then in 1995 Chad got a paper route exactly 1 mile from our house and he noticed that a guy had a Z50 that looked better then new, the guy said he bought it from a older couple that bought it along with a twin to it for camping, he said if he was to sell it he would have to get $800, we thought he was nuts-but so was the bike! He started to get a bug to redo his bike so we started to hunt around for parts and we could not find a chain guard or back fender for the life of us. Chad decided to get his bike painted a | ||
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brand new blue so he went with 1995 Corvette blue. The bike was a K2 frame, K1 tank, and a recovered seat. It looked great to us! In 1996-97 we started to see Z50 mini trails in cycle books for $700-$1000 so we thought, WOW these bikes are crazy we should try and find more of them. Well it was summer time and a group of 7 of us guys went on a trip to a huge G0-Kart park in Wisconsin and when we got back our dad had an ad cut out and a note saying that we had to go and pick up a Blue 1971 Honda Trail 70 just like the one he had when he was a kid. We were very happy to hear the news! The bike was a very low mile bike so we did not want to drive it. To this | |
| day we have put less then one mile on it. In 1996 we went and looked at a 1964 Chevy II Nova that we were really interested in but the guy was not sure if he wanted to sell it quite yet. He also had a 1970 Candy/Red/Silver Z50A K1 that they bought brand new from the Local Honda Dealer (Roger's Village) and they did not want to sell that. Well we kept our eyes out for bikes as always but nothing came of it, until one | ||
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day Chad and I decided that it had been a year since we talked with that guy about the Nova or that darn mini trail. We had a plan to make the guy think that we were interested in the car so we could try and talk him into selling that darn Z50 K1. Well after seeing the car again it was so nice and the price was right we had to have. The guy still said he did not want to sell the bike though. Well when we went to get the car we asked again and | |
| he said he would call back if he wanted to sell it. Two weeks later we got a call and he decided to sell it! We went and got it and we couldn't decide if we wanted to keep it original like the guy who had the beautiful one on Chad's paper route or what?? Well the paint was faded but all the parts were good so it would be an easy resto. We went ahead and re-painted it and we used all the old parts. In the summer of 1998 we decided it was time to get the 1971 Blue CT-70 painted to make it look like new again. The 648 mile bike looked like amazing when it was finished. The perfect original seat is the focal point of this bike and is the most important part of any CT-70 restoration. When we came across e-bay in the fall of 1999 we started thinking that if we could sell off the nice used parts we could buy new parts. We had no idea that |
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| the new parts from Honda were not the same as the ones on the original bikes and that bothered us. We decided that if we were going to do a bike it had to have all the major components/rare parts made up of NOS parts. We started watching e-bay and we learned about some of the great web-pages like Monkeybike.com and the Enumclaw Mini Trail Factory and such. We started to learn more about the bikes and that lead us both down the road to wanting to build a 1968 Z50A K0. The white grips to use were the coolest thing on earth. The next question was where were we going to find a first year bike? We noticed that a guy by the name of Steve Cleveland out in Washington had a K0 so we thought it would be worth a shot to ask him to sell the bike. He decided to sell it and we had it shipped to us. The bike was a mess but it was a K0 and we needed a challenge. Gathering parts for that bike was like trying to find a needle in a field full of hay stacks!! The parts | ||
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gathering went great until we needed to find an NOS front fender and a correct seat. The fender came with time but the original seat seemed like it would be impossible to find. Without the help of Dave Abercrombie out in Washington this K0 project would still be in the parts gathering stages and not the assembly stages. In the summer of 2000 we came across a 1974 CT-70 and a Z50A K2. Both of these bikes we sold off to help pay for the NOS parts on the other bikes. The K2 went to California and the CT-70 went to a good friend of ours, Nick Maida. Those two bikes were not the only ones that we came across that summer. A friend of ours that we have know all our lives stopped by and said "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but Gary got his bike | |
| back". We went crazy, Gary was the guy from the paper route that had the beautiful all original Z50A K1. We stopped by his house pretending we didn't know about the bike because he had another bike that we were supposed to look at when he called us the winter before when we asked if he could ask his brother to sell us the bike. He said to us, "Did you hear I got my 50 back," we played dumb and he showed it to us. Well to make a long story short we got it for the same price he wanted five years ago! That same summer the K0 project got underway with a new paint job the day before we left for college. When school started in the fall we kept our |
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| eyes open for bikes in our home away from home (Minneapolis, MN). We came across a Z50A K1 that was a parts bike but it gave us an idea to use the main parts and buy as many NOS parts as possible. That same day the guy had a bike that we did not think we would like until we saw it in person. It was a 1988 ZB50. We remember looking at one in 1988 at a Honda dealer and it was unique. Once Chad saw what Jan Harde in California did to his, he was so excited! That same fall an NOS Z50A K1 frame and Fork hit e-bay and we were thinking that an NOS bike would be the ultimate way to go! We had to get it. The deal was made on my birthday | ||
| (Jeremy) November 28th. By this time we had a pile of bikes going, our main goal was to have all the colors of the first two years of the Z50 Mini Trails. So the NOS Dream bike would need to be yellow/silver and we would need to get a yellow/white K0. Well Chad had all the hard to find NOS parts to build a K0 except a frame, tank, and motor. Well we once again turned to the state of Washington and got a slant guard K0 frame, tank, motor, and muffler from Reese Burnett the guy that happens to be friends with the guy the K0 came from. When the NOS frame came in the mail included with it was an NOS slant muffler Guard in the bag which was exactly the part the New |  |
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| K0 project needed.
As you can tell there is a lot of work that needs to be done to finish
some of these projects but it is such a great hobby that it never gets
old! If anyone has any questions or if anyone is in need of parts
please feel free to e-mail us as we love to be of help. Or if
you just feeling like talking Mini Trails, drop us a line at
polson121@prodigy.net
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You should
post these on your page for people to check out! My brother and I just
bought this two 1969 Z50's, they are 5 serial #s apart and they are as
close to new as you can get. They came with the titles, the owners
manuals, and the tool kits under the seats! They are one heck of an
addition to our collection. If you can please change the e-mail address on
our portion of your web-page to
rpolson121@prodigy.net Thanks!
Jeremy From Duluth, Minnesota
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Trail 70 Carb Restoration |
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New! The Wheelie-ing Elvi |
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