There are some cool machines in this joint. What brought me to Dave is a shared love of archaic high-performance; a casual glance will show you that the future flat tracker on the stand at the right is not so different from the choppers on the other stands. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Overall Rating: ++Too many customs go together without much thought, or one piece at a time, without any concept of what the finished product will look like. This 1987 Sportster was just such a creation. Since the start of its existence, it's been a custom machine. The 4.5 gallon tank off of an '80s FXLR was its first mod, effectively doubling the little paint shaker's cruising range. That was before I got my hands on it. Even in the years before it became the guinea pig for every ill-conceived magazine install project under the sun, it had been through three carbs, two sets of pipes, and two frontends. Once I started working for motorcycle magazines, the process only accelerated. The irony of all this tinkering is that it really didn't get ridden that much.
With a constant stream of free maintenance-free (at least to me) bikes to ride, it quickly lost some of its charm, but the fact that it wasn't relied on for transportation made it a perfect mod-mule. It was constantly offline with one project after another; the first was a 1200cc kit complete with high-compression heads and big cams. Other things done to it after that on a regular basis, keeping it an almost perpetual state of "being worked-on."
It all culminated in last issue of BIKE-WORKS, with the retirement of its original (well, the original cases, anyhow) four-speed powerplant. Replaced with a late-'90s vintage race motor (complete with brand new five-speed transmission and top-end), it had completely morphed into a Frankenstein monster hodgepodge of pieces that just happened to fit in an XL chassis. This last extreme project was to be its last, giving it a reliable motor and tranny for it to live out its days. It didn't quite work out, though. The problem now was that it looked like the Frankenstein that it was, with a very eclectic mix of the high-performance and silly stuff. Verdict: I still didn't want to ride it.
To bring the bike a completely different direction, and to unify its appearance, we sat down with noted bobber builder Chopper Dave to sketch out a new look for the machine. Ironically, in the end, it's gaining quite a few stock Sportster parts and shedding a good deal of complexity, becoming the stripped-down, aggressive street machine I've always wanted. Due to space and time considerations, the complete transformation won't be covered on these pages; you'll just just a basic look at what can be done when you pay attention to the whole bike instead of one part of it, as had been the case with this bike for most of its life.
In the end, it's again become a bike I want to ride every chance I get. Can you ask for more?
| RATING GUIDE |
| ABILITY | + | TIME | + |
| TOOLS | ++ | COST | ++ |