Motorcycle Woes - YouTube

The video encapsulates the issues that I've been having with my CBR.

 

How many miles are on your bike?
The oil seal on your drive shaft may not be to be bad to do. I've never done one but you may be able to pry it out and press in a new one. Honestly I've never had one go on a bike but that's how you'd fix it on a car.

You need air, fuel and ignition to make an engine gun. On a gas engine the ignition is spark. Basically an engine is just a big air pump. Really not all that complex. It's the electronics on newer vehicles that are a pain.

As far as your bike goes I'd start with fuel as it should at least sputter if there's an air issue.
Do your carb float bowls have gas in them? With the bike start if you spray some ether in the carbs?
F3's have a fuel pump. Is this working?
If you have fuel and the bike wont fire on ether check spark. Pull a plug and touch the end while your turning over... (just kidding but it is a fun prank to play and works if you've got the cojones to handle it). Take the plug and place it against something metal to ground it out. Turn over the engine and don't touch the plug unless you want a zap. Do you see a blue spark? If yes then you have spark.

So the problem could be air if both those things check out. Not that your not getting air but that it's not being controlled. Your engine has calves that control the intake and the exhausting of air. If your timing is out your bike will not start because the wrong valves are open at the wrong point in the ignition cycle.
You could also have bad rings. Your piston must have a good seal to the cylinder wall in order to make compression and act as a pump for all that air. No seal and you can't compress the gas to make combustion happen.
So where I'm going with this, if you have spark and you have fuel you need to check compression. There's a lot of things that could cause you to loose it. If you get to the point where you have bad compression we can talk about additional causes but your looking at big money most likely to fix it. Well big money for a broke college kid at least.

Since you already use YouTube I recommend you do a search on there for mrmaxstorey
His channel has some very detailed and informative videos for motorcycle repair. Mostly older bikes like ours. You can learn a lot from watching them. Also search this forum. There's tons and tons of good info on it.
Also do a google search for you repair manual.
Normally you can find a PDF file for free.
Better still as the factory manual is kind of technical and not that great IMO, get yourself a clymer manual for your bike. It's like a textbook specifically for your bike that goes into great detail on how to repair it. Remember you have to diagnose the problem though. You can find them under 20 bucks on eBay and amazon.

Best of luck to you.
Let us know what happens.

 

+1 to jeff. well explained. bikes are really simple to diagnose if you have the patience to see it through.
check for spark and fuel first. usually the problem with these bikes is carb and fuel supply related. pull the plugs too and post a picture, keep them in order. they will tell the story.

 

Jeff: Thanks for the TON of advice. The bike has around 33k miles on it I've got the service manual from Honda, and have been going through that to learn how to take things apart and what have you.

74demon: Good to know, from what everyone says, it looks like I'll have to take a look at the spark plugs first.

Thanks for everything, and I'll keep you guys informed as to what happens. I've got a couple of free days during the week, and I'm going to be using this time to break down my bike to see whats up with it.

 

CBR F3 Update - YouTube

Video update

 

Sounds like its time for a carb cleaning my friend

 

I almost thought she was going to sputter to life for a second there.
I know you said compression sounds good but to be honest you can't ever really tell from sound. Be sure to do a compression test if you still can't get it to start and eliminate spark as an issue. A test kit will run you around 30 bucks or so and is just a pressure gauge but I think it's one of those tools you can rent at your local autozone or advance auto.
You should be getting 130's for compression. Normally as long as its above 100 you'll be alright but 130's is where it should be.

 

When I first took the airbox off, and tried to start it up, it sputtered once, then went back to cranking over. I'll run over to O'Riellys and look for a compression kit.

 

lets see what those plugs look like, with starting fluid you would expect the engine to catch a little more then i did... after all the ether is taking the place of raw fuel so that takes the carbs out of the picture to a small extent... although a good cleaning and syncing will do you nothing but good

 

The color of the plugs will only really tell you about tuning issues. Now if they're oil soaked or something then that'll point you in a different direction. Provided he has spark it should fire on ether. Compression should definitely be checked next. If its bad then you head down that rabit hole. Also ether does take carbs out of equation. Even if it's flooded it should fire on ether. If there's no compression though it won't run. The air fuel mixture must be compressed to a high psi in order to ignite.