![Image](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rAnkw9KglDQ/TxGXmSeS1KI/AAAAAAAACq0/Zv9PuRJYM_Q/s1600/1113111111.jpg)
![Image](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CeWZBUchQOo/UriiZswVuxI/AAAAAAAAAJ4/jif-nO-hNDg/s1600/spree1.jpg)
![Image](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3586/3670622673_05e3e7f5b5_z.jpg)
I believe all of them use the factory chrome mount that by itself is sometimes called the front rack. The third photo is pretty much the best for showing the mount.
The kind of factory rack I was looking for is this one:
![Image](http://images.craigslist.org/00h0h_ewKkvkluqfl_600x450.jpg)
I found a guy on ebay who seems to have an unlimited amount of "Honda" C70 baskets, and for a reasonable price. They have front "loops" at the top of the front edge, so they look a lot like the Spree factory basket and are smaller than the Aero 50 or Gyro NN50 front basket. In any event, I ordered one and it came in pretty quickly.. shipping is very prompt from that vendor. The basket itself falls short of true Honda quality in a number of ways, so it may be just a cheap made-in-China copy of a C70 basket... not sure about that. The white finish is rubber, instead of paint. The front name plate that is supposed to have the Honda sticker is the wrong shape. The main horizontal ribs don't really line up with each other where they join, the mounting plates are not lined up squarely with the basket, and the mounting hardware is laughably cheap and useless. The biggest problem is that the mounting plates that are part of the basket are on top of the wires, inside the basket, instead of being below the wires and outside of the basket. That means that the heads of any mounting bolts will stick out into the inside of the basket. However, since the original baskets are called unicorns on this site, I decided the cheap C70 basket would be better than nothing for mounting on the new Spree. Here is a listing to the ebay ad:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HONDA-C70-PASSP ... 5e&vxp=mtr
I started the mounting project by bending the main u-shaped bracket out of 3/4 inch steel bar stock. This piece is most important in that it defines how far away the basket will be from the main front plastic. Note that the stock mounting bolts have a 1/8 inch shoulder on them so that the plastic "floats" and is not pinched by the mounting bolt. I made small tubular 1/8 spacers to fit over stock 6 mm flange bolts, to allow the plastic to float. I also rounded the ends of the bar stock to match the round relief in the plastic cover. The spacers go between the u-shaped bracket and the Spree frame and don't show in this photo:
The next step was to temporarily mount the C70 basket to measure the spacing of the top mount. The basket should be roughly parallel to the front plastic:
Since I wasn't planning to chrome plate the mount, I decided to skip the effort needed to form the mounting bracket out of a single piece of rod stock bent to shape as was done by the Honda factory. Instead, I decided to use the mounting design that was used by the factory on the Gyro NN50 basket, using two pieces of rod, bent to shape:
I also copied the top mount of the Gyro:
Next, I test fit all the pieces on the Spree and held everything in place with vise-grips. Note the additional piece of flat bar stock at the bottom that lines up with the bottom mounting plate on the C70 basket:
Then I carefully removed everything as a unit, and tig-welded all the parts together, and then painted the mount with white two-part epoxy paint:
Lastly, I fitted the basket and screwed it down. I threw way the hardware that came with the basket and used a piece of 3/4 flat bar stock for at the top mounting bar and painted it while I was painting the rack. That bar shows at the top of this next photo:
The final photo is the beauty shot showing what the basket looks like when complete:
At the end of the project, I went back trying to figure out why the Spree won't start. Still working on that and still frustrated, but that is a subject for a different post.