Reviews for riders: 1983 Honda Nighthawk

Honda put the Nighthawk name on motorcycles for the better part of two decades, but we are only going to talk about one year.... 1983. It's when the badge stopped being a paint job and started meaning something, the year Honda took a mid-size standard nobody was excited about and rebuilt it from the crank up.

Before 1983, it was just a facelift

The Nighthawk name first showed up in 1982, stitched onto the existing CB650: new tank, new side covers, the round headlight that would define the family look for the next four years. Nothing under the tank had changed. It was a haircut, not a redesign.

After1983...

The 1983 CB650SC Nighthawk swapped the old single-cam, two-valve engine for a full DOHC, 16-valve, 656cc four making 72 horsepower. Honda gave it a six-speed gearbox with a shaft drive instead of a chain, rubber-mounted the whole drivetrain to kill vibration, and gave the front end brake-actuated anti-dive suspension. None of that was expected on a mid-size standard in 1983. Anti-dive forks were flagship technology;

Every write-up on this bike leads with the horsepower number, but I genuinely find the shaft drive the biggest change they made here. Shaft means zero chain adjustments, no more making a mess with chain lube, and zero replaced sprockets. Honda built a shaft-drive, rubber-mounted, chain-free standard in an era when most of its competitors still expected owners to babysit a drive chain every 500 miles.

Everything after 1983 was a variant

The CB700SC Nighthawk S that showed up a year later gets all the attention because of its origin story, Honda bored a 750 down to 696cc to dodge a US tariff on Japanese motorcycles over 700cc. But the 700SC didn't introduce anything new. It was the 1983 platform with a bigger bore and a digital gear indicator bolted on.

The 1983 CB650SC, at a glance

• Engine: 656cc DOHC inline-four, 16 valves, 72 hp

• Drivetrain: 6-speed gearbox, shaft final drive, rubber-mounted engine

• Chassis: brake-actuated anti-dive front forks, dual front discs

• Why it matters: the first Nighthawk-badged bike with real engineering behind the name — the platform every later Nighthawk, including the tariff-dodging 700SC, was built on

Why it's still the one to buy

Forty-plus years later, a clean 1983 CB650SC Nighthawk is one of the smartest used buys in motorcycling, for the same reasons it was smart in 1983: no chain maintenance, an engine that was overbuilt from day one, and a used-market price that has never caught up to how good the bike actually is.