No one takes your bike as seriously as you do. Remember that when you look for advice on user forums. You probably assume that guys on YouTube who have created hundreds of how-to videos are experts. And that the very prolific and vocal contributors on forums are too. Uh uh. None of them have the combination of experience and training that a career mechanic has. Forum "authorities" are drawing from a well that is really not very deep at all. Even a first semester tech school student is way ahead of them. If you can't accept that you will never appreciate and understand your fifty year old Honda as you should.

Because the forum voices don't. Appreciate and understand your bike, that is. Most of the maintenance practices advocated on forums are unintelligent and show a lack of understanding of vintage Hondas, and in most cases even of general maintenance of any motorcycle. The advocacy of aftermarket parts is high and the respect for factory engineering very low. And even when Honda can rightly be faulted for something, forum "experts" invariably have the wrong explanation of the reason and even worse ideas about the solution.

In short, forum ethos wallows in the mire of the sensational and titillating while being completely ignorant and even disdainful of the high ground of very basic mechanical principles. Honda's valve recession issue is a perfect, glaring example. Forums are silent about it. Yet it is the single most important and needful of attention issue of anything on your 70s Honda. Period. No contest. It is more critical than ethanol, more important than carburetor jetting, and way more substantive than adding relays to your wiring harness. Silicone brake fluid is another prime example. Though the most important maintenance decision you can make for your low-use motorcycle, Internet pundits are at best indifferent about it and most are actually derisive regarding its use. This is patently ignorant. The powersports media is demonstrably not the clearing house of maintenance information it wants you to think it is. Far from it. The mainstream motorcycle technical community is virtually absent on forums. If you're a forum regular you are not even aware of the real world, the vastly more massive and more meaningful universe outside of the web.