Welcome aboard — and a Jan '84 F is a good place to start. They’re a sound bike to learn on and there’s plenty of knowledge here for the rough ones.
On the black and silver: you’re not imagining it. The F-family ran several schemes — the blue/white/red, a red/white, and a silver/black like yours (Honda’s own naming shifts a bit between markets, so you’ll see it written both ways). By observation the blue/white/red is the one that turns up most often, though I’d be honest that this is an impression rather than something anyone has counted.
Which is the real answer to your records question: Honda never published production figures by colour. There’s no factory count of “how many black ones”, so nobody has one — anyone quoting a number is guessing. What we do have:
- The model pages here list the colour schemes per year and model.
- Our UK registration audit gives per-model totals (FE, FF, F2, RE, RF, RG) straight from DfT data.
- And the forum’s own UK survivors thread is effectively the record we’re building ourselves, bike by bike.
One thing worth checking on yours. You mention it has an SC16E engine fitted. SC16E is the VF1000R engine prefix — the F and F2 use SC15E. If it really is an R engine, that’s a meaningful difference: the R runs gear-driven cams rather than the F’s chain drive, so cam-drive parts and settings don’t interchange. Worth confirming the frame prefix too (SC15 = F, SC16 = R) so you know exactly what you’ve got before you start buying parts. It may well be a later swap rather than anything odd — but better to know now than halfway through a rebuild.
Post up the frame and engine numbers, or start a thread in Ask VF Bob — happy to help you work out what it is and what it needs.
VF Bob