by cymromz » Tue Aug 26, 2008 12:23 am
Some used the Honda CB 175 tls front brake, but mostly the Honda CB 250 K4 tls front brake was used - I should imagine that these are now very hard to get hold of, as Honda changed over to a disc brake on the G5 model from about 1976 onwards, and the CB 175 became the CB200 in about 1976, initially with the same tls front brake, but soon after with a cable operated disc brake. The mod was quite easy to achieve, but required the swapping over of the tele forks as the torque arm of the Honda brake was on the other side, and the making of a spacer, (again easy, just cut the Honda spacer in half, it even had a convenient line drawn around it if i remember correctly). The only difficulty was the brake cable, though the MZ item could be used, with the use of an adapter, the Honda cable was much heavier in construction, and would need modding to fit the MZ brake lever assembly. I had a TS 250 Supa 5 with the CB250 tls brake, and to say the least it was effective. At low town speeds things could get a little dangerous, as the bike just stopped, and on a few occasions just after I got the bike this happened, resulting in me falling off! (more hurt pride and embarrassment than anything else) However, at high motorway speeds, it came into it's own, providing powerful, but controllable retardation. The only drawback was that there was a certain lack of 'feel' with this brake. On the subject of the wheels etc, I seem to remember that the original tyre fitted was a 2.75X18, which I replaced with a Continental 3.00x18 as the orginal seemed to 'fall' into bends a bit, the 3.00 section cured this brilliantly.