In late 1995 I went to my local dealer to buy a used CBR900RR that had been sitting around for a few months. As luck would have it, they had sold it the day before! The shop owner knew I had considered a 900SS/SP earlier and offered me a new 900SS/CR at a great price. I bought that instead, along with some FbF pipes and a jet kit. Once I brought that bike home my Honda Hawk stopped getting ridden. So did my 907... I really liked the SS. But then in 2000 I couldn't hold out any longer and bought a 996. The CR had to go, but I swore I'd buy another 900ss "someday".

Someday turned out to be in August, 2008. Here are my intial impressions of the bike. I intend for this to become my "main" bike so over the winter I've been giving it some TLC. Click here for my list of fixes, which are pretty common for Super Sports of this era. Click here for some pics of common problems with these bikes.

1995 900ss/cr

I didn't do many mods to this bike over the years I had it - Typical stuff like pipes, airbox, jets, and regeared it. Here's a pic of the kind of things I used to do at work when things got slow.

The thing on the cart is an Aachen head, a recording device that's used a lot in the auto industry to study NVH and sound quality. Here we're recording the sound of my 900ss with FbF pipes. Click on the following links for a sample; they're large files, but sound much better than typical DAT recordings. (Assuming you've got decent speakers, and a subwoofer for the full effect)

Duc900ss.wav is about 6meg, duckidle2.wav is closer to 1 meg.

On the left is a 900ss/cr, basically stock except for the Fast by Ferracci high-mount pipes. On the right, the same bike with a 900SL-style solo seat. I traded the bike in on the 996 before I ever got the solo tail worked out. (It was damaged in shipping, or at least that's what the jerk who sold it to me said. He never did come through with an insurance claim though!)