It certainly isn’t every day that you see a new-old stock 1981 Honda GL500 engine still in its crate. If you’re lucky, though, you can find one and strange things can happen—and even better, they might take you on an unexpected journey. That seems to be what happened here, when BJ of Brickhouse Builds first got his hands on this particular crate of Japanese iron wonder. He runs a custom shop and a YouTube channel, so of course he made some videos about the process.
It all started right after the New Year. On January 3, 2022, BJ proudly introduced the GL500 crate that he said he’d bought off a dealer friend. The theme of that first video was “oh, we can’t open this, it should be in a museum or something.” BJ then took a boroscope and shared some careful (albeit grainy, though that’s totally understandable) footage from inside the crate, without disturbing or prying the wood in any way.
