so after an excessive amount of time looking at the Bike Shed my girlfriend has come up with the possibly ambitious/expensive plan of making a modern cafe racer herself.
After playing around with a few options of what could be the donor bike and after getting past my ducati bias we’ve settled on a new street triple. Really useable power, good riding position if a little hard suspension wise and easy gearbox/clutch compared with my tractor one.
I’ve mocked up what the plan is with a bit of a dodgy photoshop and we’re not trying to go all out on replacing everything, not least because we want the bike to still perform as standard.
We’ve had a few leads but maybe people here can help more on the following:
replace headlight with single cafe racer style headlight.
custom tank
custom subframe and seat unit
wire wheels
custom low exhaust (not pictured)
Any input on people who are good and have good turn around times would be greatly appreciated. Ideally needs to be completed by start of July
to get a custom tank made to match the shape of the frame there is going to be a bit complicated I think. or are you going to modify the current one?
if you’re going to switch to a single headlamp, are you going to get rid of the instrument cluster too? the stock one will stick out a fair bit: http://images.motorcycle-usa.com/PhotoGallerys/speed-triple-dash.jpg
personally, I would go for something like the triumph speed four. reliability issues aside, that era of bikes are a lot more customisable.
wouldn’t know fella but happy for them to mod the standard/pick up a spare tank for them to work on if thats the best way to go about it.
prob keep the cluster, and get another triumph single headlight - prob means a bit of cocking around with brackets and shaving down the plastic underside of the cluster.
definitely appreciate there are easier bikes to customise but the key thing with this is the bike itself and making it more to her taste. she’s bought the bike already.
You can probably find a nice norton style seat to fit but if you want a custom seat and tank then best try the guys at www.thetankshop.com they do great work
Oh and for wire wheels drop into crcmotorcycles.com they’re based down the road from the ace and have got some really nice wire wheels made up for their Harris specials they might be able to help with yours
We found a guy named Ray at Rosso Corsa (East London) who was willing to have a crack at this albeit with a sense of wry scepticism - its not exactly the normal donor bike for this kind of thing, and his normal fare is as a ducati specialist. They’re actually quite enjoying it as the fabrication and ideas are far from run of the mill and require equal parts of head scratching and swearing…lubricated with cups of tea.
Heres a few shots at varying stages - all pretty crappy iPhone ones but you get the idea. Custom seat is being made and wire wheels are en route from italy. Fingers crossed all should be sorted in good time for the road trip to Italy:
