Legal — Guides

Guides disclaimer

IronHead™ restoration guides are written for adult vintage-motorcycle restorers. They are informational; they are not a replacement for the factory service manual, an official dealer service bulletin, or the judgement of a qualified professional mechanic inspecting your specific motorcycle.

Safety first

Vintage motorcycles carry hazards that modern machines do not. Drum brakes with non-asbestos linings, contact-breaker ignition with high-failure-rate condensers, rigid-rear frames with no rear suspension travel, single-leading-shoe front brakes on pre-1969 machines, magnetos with exposed high-voltage terminals, and tire / tube / rim combinations that are no longer produced for street use are all common in the decades the guides cover.

Assume nothing. Every fastener, every electrical joint, every fuel connection should be inspected before the motorcycle is ridden. Wear the right personal protective equipment for the work — safety glasses for any pressure test, nitrile gloves for fuel-system work, a respirator for media-blasting. Have a qualified professional mechanic inspect the build at critical junctures (engine reassembly, brake system, electrical fault-finding, frame paint removal).

Informational use only

A guide is a starting point. It lays out the nominal factory specifications, the common failure modes, the typical procedures a workshop applies to a clean restoration. It is not, and is not meant to be, a comprehensive instruction for every individual motorcycle in the model family.

You are responsible for verifying each operation against your specific motorcycle's actual condition. If the guide's instructions conflict with what you see on the bench, stop and investigate. Force-fitting a procedural step to a motorcycle that doesn't match the guide's assumption is a primary cause of restoration damage.

Model and year variation

Model families span multiple sub-models, revisions, and production years. The CB750 covers K0-K8 (1969–1978). The Triumph Bonneville covers T120 / T140 (1963-1979). The Harley-Davidson SHOVELHEAD covers 1966-1984 cast-iron and 1980-1984 aluminum-head engines that have different cylinder-head bolt patterns. Within any one model family, tolerances, fasteners, electrical systems, and carburettor jetting can vary by year, market, and option package.

A guide covers the model family at large. Cross-check the year-specific details against a factory service manual for your exact motorcycle before applying any torque value, jet size, or timing figure.

Omissions and uncertainty

A guide may not cover every variant, every optional package, every production-year detail, every market-specific configuration, or every recall / service-bulletin the manufacturer issued. Some operations are summarised rather than fully detailed (paint prep, chrome plating, powder coating). Some operations are intentionally flagged for professional referral (frame welding, hard-facing, chroming).

A guide may be uncertain about a value (a torque spec sourced from a single secondary source, a wire colouration observed across non-factory harness repair). When the guide is uncertain it says so. Don't paper over the uncertainty.

Verify with authoritative sources

For every critical specification — torque values, bearing clearances, ignition timing, jet sizes, valve clearances, fastener thread pitches — cross-check the guide against at least one authoritative source before applying it:

• The factory service manual for your exact model and year.
• The factory parts catalogue (for OEM part numbers, superseded cross-reference data, and option-package identification).
• Official service bulletins issued by the manufacturer (Honda Service Bulletin, Lucas Technical Communication, BMW Service Information, etc.).
• A qualified professional mechanic who has worked on similar machines in your region — local practices (frame clearance in Australia, MOT in the UK, TÜV in Germany, state-level safety inspection in the US) are not covered in the guide.

No result guarantee

IronHead™ does not guarantee that following the guide will produce any particular restoration result. A vintage-motorcycle restoration outcome depends on the starting condition of the donor motorcycle, the availability of OEM or reproduction parts in your market at the time of your build, the skill level of the restorer, the local regulatory environment, and a hundred other variables the guide cannot control.

The guide is built around the most common restoration path. Your motorcycle may not take that path. Be prepared to adapt, to refer out, and to walk away from recommendations that don't fit the machine you have.

No completeness or accuracy warranty

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, IronHead™disclaims any warranty of completeness, accuracy, or fitness for a particular purpose on the guide content. Where the buyer's jurisdiction forbids the exclusion of certain warranties (for example, consumer-protection regimes that forbid the disclaimer of merchantability for personal-use content), the disclaimer applies only to the extent the jurisdiction allows.

Asking the platform when in doubt

Stuck on a step? The guide's in-app feedback widget is the fastest way to send a question. The author team reviews feedback weekly and updates the guide when a step is being consistently mis-applied. For specialised questions, the Ask-Mechanic button on the guide surface opens a paid conversation with a vintage-specialist mechanic.

Effective date: 2026-08-26. This document is informational and has not been reviewed by qualified counsel. Items about jurisdiction-specific enforceability of disclaimer-of-warranty clauses in personal-use content, the carve-outs for non-excludable warranties, and the platform's exposure under product-liability regimes require professional legal review before this text can be relied on as a binding contract.