Reo Haynes returns classic motorcycles to their original glory
STORY AND PHOTOS by Jim McCarty
Michelle had a problem while preparing for a motorcycle road trip. Her Victory motorcycle needed some work. She had changed the oil herself, but the bike needed to be level to check the oil. The machine didn’t have a centerstand though.
“I could hold the bike, or I could check the oil. But I couldn’t do both,” she says. Frustrated, she started asking around for a competent motorcycle mechanic.
“Call Reo Haynes,” she was told. So she did. Despite having a backlog of bikes to repair, Reo, smitten by his new customer, moved Michelle to the head of the line. He not only made her bike roadworthy, he also washed it and detailed it.
“I was looking for a mechanic,” Michelle says. “I found a husband.”
Reo takes over the two-wheeled love story: “She came in needing a battery for her Victory is how I met her. I said, ‘Do you ride motorcycles?’ She said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got a couple dirt bikes and a Victory.’ We started going out and the next thing I knew I’m married to her. Now she never has to buy tires or batteries, put gas in, wash them or nothing. She’s set.”
A Business in a Cornfield
That chance encounter led to a unique business located in the middle of a cornfield situated in a community that’s no longer on the map. Fans of classic motorcycles from all over the U.S. manage to find Reo’s Locust Hill Classics for a simple reason: there are few, if any, mechanics who will take on the challenge of rebuilding obsolete motorcycles.
“All the dealers say, ‘No way,’ ” Reo points out. “If it’s over 10 years old they say, ‘We don’t work on carburetors, and we don’t even know what points are.’ Of course, the tech schools don’t teach points and carbs anymore. They skip that. They offer it as a separate vintage course is what I heard but most people don’t bother taking it.”
Reo, a member of Lewis County REC, started his mechanic career in 1998. He worked at Kirksville car and motorcycle shops where he learned to fix anything on wheels. In 2022, he and Michelle married and he launched his own shop on the family farm where she grew up.
“I started in the other shed with no heat or nothing while they were working on this one,” Reo says. “It took about a year. After working in shops for a long time I kind of knew how I wanted everything laid out. It didn’t take a ton of thought because I knew exactly how I wanted it.”
It was a leap of faith. Would Reo’s former customers find him in the new business located between Novelty and Hurdland? “I hoped people would keep coming,” Reo admits. “They did, and they come from all over. I’ve got a guy from Wisconsin, I work on his stuff. Indiana, Texas, South Dakota. A lot of them from around Lake of the Ozarks. A guy brings me stuff from Iowa City.”
Classics on Display
The well-designed shop opens into a showroom where classic bikes — some for sale and some Reo will never part with — are on display. The rarest is a tiny 1964 Honda C105T Trail 55. This one is all original, down to the tires.
“It was made for use by hunters and farmers,” Reo says. “It had accessories from Honda like a gun boot, shovel holder, a double loop to haul 5-gallon buckets to put your feed in.”
Nearby is an all-original SL90, a motorcycle Honda only made for one year, 1969. Its frame and many other parts are unique to the bike, making replacement parts difficult to find.
There’s a three-cylinder Kawasaki S3 400 street bike that tested Reo’s resolve to restore it. The bike was wrecked, had spent a long time outdoors and was “rusty and crusty” as Reo puts it. He tore it all the way down, bored the triple cylinders, rebuilt the crankshaft, recovered the seat, replaced the fork seals, repaired the oil injector, repainted it and didn’t stop until it was returned to factory condition.
The lineup continues with a Honda 450 scrambler, a 1964 Honda 305 Super Hawk, a Harley Sportster, an ungainly looking BMW and the frighteningly fast Honda CBX, a 6-cylinder superbike.
“The CBX is my favorite to ride,” Reo says. “It will go 140. It sounds like a Ferrari. It revs up to 11,000 rpm.”
Then there’s a row of off-road rides, including several Reo rode in motocross, flat track, trials and drag racing events. His success can be seen in the many plaques and trophies on display.
One of the knobby-tire rides is a blue Kawasaki 100. “I had that exact same bike I got when I was 11,” Reo says. “I thought that was really something. You could change gears and it would accelerate going up the hill.”
Reo got his start with a Honda 50 Express moped he bought at a yard sale. “We didn’t have a ton of money so I would buy an old bike and my dad would help fix it up. And then I would keep trading up and pretty soon you had something pretty sweet.”
Sweating the Details
He takes his restorations to another level few would attempt. For example, he will research the way nuts and bolts were installed at the factory and make sure his repairs match the original.
“I try to be able to do every single step where I don’t have to sub anything out,” Reo says. He can make new cables, even painting them if they aren’t the color of the original. He will tear down a wheel to polish the spokes and rim, then true it so the bike rolls smooth.
Engines are easy for him, transmissions take just a little longer. And while Reo loves to peruse repair manuals, he rarely needs to refer to one.
He’s one of the few people who can synchronize the six carburetors on a Honda CBX or set the timing on a Suzuki using a dial indicator and a buzz box. “That’s the thing, they just don’t know how to do it,” he says. “That’s why they keep showing up at Locust Hill. They need someone to fix them, or they start and don’t know how to finish.”
This attention to detail and ability to restore priceless original parts pays off when Reo sells one of his restorations. He sold one bike — a 1974 Honda CL450 — for $16,500 at a Las Vegas auction. He’s shipped restored motorcycles as far away as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany.
There is more to the love story and one of the bikes on display tells the story. It’s a 1981 Honda Z50 minibike, and like everything in the showroom it looks like it just rolled out of the factory. “I got it for Christmas when I was 5,” Michelle says. “And honestly that is the bike that brought us together. Because that caused me to love motorcycles.”
Her first ride on the minibike was in her dad’s shop where she promptly ran into a tractor. From there the bike was ridden to near death.
Reo tracked down the battered bike and miraculously restored it to the way it looked on that long-ago Christmas morning Michelle remembers.
Nostalgia for a bike from their youth is what brings most customers to Locust Hill Classics. “They’ve either had one forever or they found one just like it,” Reo says. “They kind of want to go back to that time. They won’t hardly ever ride them. They will ride once or twice and then park them. But they just want to know that they’ve got it sitting there to look at.”
The 43-year-old mechanic is one of those people. “I never thought I’d be the vintage guy, because I’m not that old,” he says. “Every bike is older than me, almost every single one of them.”
Locust Hill Classics is located between Novelty and Hurdland on State Route A. You can contact the shop at 660-730-5101, reosrides@gmail.com and on Facebook and TikTok.
Email Jim McCarty at jmccarty@ruralmissouri.coop.