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Harley-Davidson RoadXster Is a Wannabe Cafe Racer

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com Giant Harley-Davidson is not a bike maker that makes a living by selling cafe racers. However, there are several such Harley-based two-wheelers out there thanks to the many customs shops working on such projects. These conversions are done in independent garages, who put in a lot of work and money to come up with incredible such independent projects at times. But the one we have here can be considered Harley-sanctioned. Sort of. The bike in the gallery above is called RoadXster and has been built by the bike maker’s Autostar dealership from Sao Paolo, Brazil. It was the shop’s entrance in the King of Kings custom build competition dedicated to dealers that concluded last month. Based on a Harley-Davidson Roadster, the bike has been designed with the cafe racers of the 1960s as inspiration, and its name combines the words Roadster and XR. Following the rules of the competition, which called for just a number of modifications to be made, the dealership did its best to make the final product reflect the style of the bikes it honors. One of the most visible changes is the fitting of a Scrambler-style exhaust, which should allow the motorcycle to lean more in curves. A custom paint job on the tank is supposed to “give a rebellious look to the finish of this classic and aggressive machine.” The Brazilian shop did not win King of Kings with this build, but was allowed entry because it won, as did the other 15 participants, the previous Battle of the Kings (BOTK). Launched a few years ago, BOTK pits Harley-’s various international dealers against one another by asking them to modify existing models into never-before-seen machines, all of which must still be road legal. The winners of previous BOTK editions, including […]

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1983 BMW R100 GS Black Ops Comes With Dented Tank Because It’s Cool

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com When someone asks for a custom build to be made based on either a car or a motorcycle, they usually ask for the finished product to be perfect. For someone living in Florida, perfect does not necessarily mean flawless. The motorcycle in the gallery above was once a stock BMW R100 GS. The R100 line was born in BMW’s stables back in 1976, and was to become the last of the German motorcycles powered by air-cooled engines. In production until 1996, the range grew to include a wide number of models, from the R100 T to the R100 GS, covering an even wider range of customer needs. Because production of these models ended quite some time ago, and BMW bikes are not usually held in such high regard to be preserved for decades, most of them are now basically useless machines. But there are some garages out there that make a buck by bringing these beatdown bikes back to life. One such garage is Paris-based Blitz Motorcycles, which focuses on giving a new purpose to old German motorcycles. Like this R100 GS here. Made at the request of what we understand is an American customer, the bike underwent a major mechanical overhaul that included an engine rebuild, the replacement of the fuel tank, the addition of new parts and, in the end, the renaming into Black Ops. Named so because the garage “wanted this bike to look stealth and mean” it kind of does not live up to the name. After all, such a dark apparition on a road somewhere is bound not to pass unnoticed, and the distinctive dents on the Honda CB350 fuel tank, kept because “this is what we liked about this tank,” sure makes it easy to pick out from a

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Greek-Made Harley-Davidson Gryps Is Part Motorcycle, Part Myth

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com Greece is one of those few places where all of the world’s mythology comes from. The place where the world of Olympus was born and all the Gods of the ancient world died, but also the place from where democracy originated, the region had a major role in shaping today’s civilization. What Greece lacks is a visible motorcycle movement in the way that there are not that many new motorcycles, custom builds, or motorcycle racers that can trace their roots back to the European country. Yet the bike in the gallery above, although based on an existing model, comes from there. It is called Gryps, a word that in the ancient Greco-Latin records means griffin; that’s a creature with most of the body of a lion, and with the head and wings of an eagle. For most people of the time, it was a symbol of power. The lion part in this here motorcycle is the Harley-Davidson Sportster that served as a base. It was transformed into this by the Harley-Davidson Athena dealership, and entered in the King of Kings custom build competition ran by the American company until April this year. Lower than it used to be, and with the fuel tank sitting at a different angle on the frame, it shows a more aggressive stance, accentuated by the reworked, cold silver body envisioned for it by the Greeks. The entire build was made to resemble the mythical creature: the tank is supposed to be the body, the front fairing the head, while the side fairings are meant to represent both the wings and the legs of the monster. Competing alongside 14 other builds coming from Harley dealers across the world, the Gryps only managed to place second during the public voting period, barely

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Apex Predator Is One Sportster Harley-Davidson Should Start Making

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com At the beginning of April, Harley-Davidson announced the winner of this year’s King of Kings competition, a mashup of the best 15 previous winners of the Battle of the Kings. Its name is Apex Predator, and with it we’re kicking off a series that will bring to light over the following days all the participants. Known in the industry as BOTK, Battle of the Kings kicked off in 2015 as a custom build competition for Harley dealers worldwide. It is, if you like, a competition of ideas Harley itself was incapable of having, but recognized by the bike maker as possibly game changing for the custom industry. The rules of the competition are simple: the base motorcycle needs to be a Harley-Davidson bike, the customization must not cost over €6,000 ($6,500) and must have at least half of the parts used taken from the Harley inventory, and the final bike must be road legal. Over the years many competed in the Battle of Kings, but in April 2020 Harley crowned one of them ruler of the pack. And as fate would have it, that King of Kings is the Apex Predator. Built by a dealer in Mexico called Harley-Davidson Queretaro, the Apex is based on the Sportster XR1200 with the stock engine, and it is supposed to be a “retro-futuristic XR-based track monster meets street fighter.” Featuring custom parts like front fork covers, dual air intakes, and wave-style brake rotors, the bike does not shy away from making use of materials not often used in the motorcycle industry, like the Alcantara on the seat. Aside from the visual upgrades made to it, the Sportster also got a full color TFT Bluetooth instrument panel, and a hand built 2-1-2 exhaust system. As for the Sportster line,

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Spectacula Motorcycle Is Proof Some Builds Are Better Than Custom Harleys

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com Absolutely awesome. These are the words used by a German custom bike garage to describe the Specula, a motorcycle the like of which the European continent had never been gifted with before. Used to seeing incredible motorcycle builds coming from the U.S., the world is at times blind when it comes to noticing other incredible machines rolling out garage doors elsewhere in the world. In Europe, for instance, the last couple of decades have seen some stunning bikes roll out into the sunset. One of the main custom garages there is Thunderbike, a German group that started out as a repair shop for Japanese motorcycles, and then moved on to customizing Harleys and making their own frames. The bike in the gallery above, called Spectacula, is part of the latter category. The design is 15 years old, but despite not being the newest kid on the block, it’s still one of the most extreme. Unlike many of the Thunderbike designs we talked about recently, the Spectacula is not powered by a Harley-Davidson engine, but uses a TP-Pro one. It is rated at 120 ps and resides in the middle of a custom frame that has been built from scratch, as did every other part of the motorcycle, for that matter. Shaped like no other bike out there, the Spectacula carefully hides all of the working parts so they are not visible: throttle, clutch, brake, gearshift and air suspension, all seem to have not been visibly linked to the fork or frame. It took the Thunderbike guys six months to bring this project from the drawing board into the real world, with a full month of that time being spent on carefully applying 28 layers of paint on the bike’s body. The Spectacula is not for

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Harley-Davidson GT One Is a Special Breed of FXDR

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com/ Generally, the GT moniker is reserved for a particular breed of cars, built specifically to offer performance, thrills, and looks to die for, even on long distance drives. But it is used on motorcycles as well to advertise the machines’ capability of handling long trips and high speeds simultaneously. There are a great number of bike builders that use the GT name for their models.Yamaha does it for the Tracer, BMW has a number of GTs too, and so does KTM. But not Harley. At least not officially, because there is a Softail FXDR out there that is called exactly that. Of course, the bike is no longer the FXDR you get at the local Harley dealer, but a customized piece of work handled by a German garage called Thunderbike. As many of their other builds, the GT One, as they call it, is the result of serious work that ended in the replacement of many original parts with custom-made ones, all for the sake of doing something Europeans are generally not used to seeing. There’s a long list of modifications made and custom parts added. The list includes new wheels, grips and exhaust system, but also a unique paintwork handled by a group called Kruse Design. Most importantly, despite having much larger wheel than stock (23 and 21 inches), the bike makes no compromise when it comes to suspension, which is essential for long-distance travels. Thunderbike says that by using a completely new triple tree, no restrictions had to be made in this respect when the new wheels were fitted. The Harley-Davidson GT One was shown for the first time at the end of last year. It is part of a family of Thunderbike builds that includes other high-profile projects, like the RS Lambo

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Custom 1981 Suzuki GS650 GL Gets New Life as the Beach Cruiser

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com/ Try as you might, you will not find many high-quality customized Suzukis out there. But when luck strikes, something like the GS650GL in the gallery below might pop up. The GS series was born as the bike maker’s first proper range of 4-stroke engined motorcycles in the late 1970s. In this series, the GL represented cruisers, backed by a larger engines and several unique technical and visual features. The bike displayed here is a GS650 GL from early on, in 1981, taken to a whole new level by a garage called Upcycle. Work on it ended last year, and the bike just popped up on a specialized auction website, with the current bid standing at just $7,500. The bike modified this way was named by its builder the Beach Cruiser, and sports enough changes to make it stand out in a crowd of other GS series. First, the body, or at least the lack of. The GS is barely dressed in any body parts, which are limited to the fuel tank and the tiny little rear fender. The frame, which includes a custom subframe holding a one-rider saddle, houses a 673cc engine, linked to a five speed manual transmission and good for 73 horsepower. There have been other modifications made to the stock Suzuki to transform it into the Beach Cruiser. There’s a reworked swingarm, the fork has been lowered, and a stainless exhaust system was added. At the rear, the motorcycle uses a 2003 Yamaha R6 shock and linkage. As a touch of class, Upcycle relocated the position of the speedometer alongside the fuel tank, and clip-on handlebars with push-button were used to replace the stock ones. The bike has barely been used. Since new, the odometer moved to just 1,400 miles (2,250 km),

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1984 BMW R80 RT Black Dot Glows Green in the Dark

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com In the world of custom motorcycles, there are more Harley-Davidsons and custom frames than anything else. Yet there are some builds, based on other motorcycles, that sure deserve their time under the spotlight. Among them is this BMW R80 RT from 1984. Part of the range that was built by the Bavarians for 13 years from 1982 to 1995, it started life as toned down version of the R 100 RT, but was turned into something spectacular at the end of 2019. Responsible for the conversion is a group that goes by the name Blitz Motorcycles. Based in Paris, the garage is just ten years old, but doesn’t shy away from taking on big projects. The Black Dot One, as the finished product is called, was reworked on behalf of a customer. The transformation included everything from an engine rebuild to new looks, all with the goal of giving a retro-modern twist to the aging two-wheeler. “We had one single request from the owner of this machine: he wanted it to make an extra sound, on top of the one made by the engine, and directly connected to the engine rev,” the builders say about the project. “This only one request, which we respected, gave us the Artistic Direction for the whole project : create a futuristic machine, as if we were living in the ’80s.” Riding on CNC machined wheels, it plays around with just three colors: black, LED green, and LED orange. Black is used all around the body, from the parts of the chassis to the rear wheel. The non-color is offset by green LED lights above and below the engine, and as rear and brake light. Orange, also coming from LEDs, is used for the turn signals. Sporting a Honda fuel

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Harley-Davidson Outerlimit Is a Mini Lamborghini Aventador

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com So, you own a Lamborghini Aventador, and that in itself is reason enough to be proud. But often times supercar owners find themselves in need of some other motorized sidekick contraption for their cars. So did a German Aventador owner, who must have thought there’s something missing from his garage, something that should not only keep the car company, but also match it in design. So he turned to custom German bike builder Thunderbike for help. The German shop started out in the 1980s as a repair place for Japanese motorcycles, but a few decades later found themselves to be quite good at either customizing Harleys, or building their own custom frames with Harley engineering inside. The Black Star 110 and the RS Lambo are perfect examples of their prowess in both fields. For the Aventador owner we mentioned above, they came up with a design called Outerlimit. Finished in 2016, it was specced as “super sporty appearance, neat pressure in the engine, big wheels and powerful brakes.” The custom frame of the bike was gifted with a Harley-Davidson twin cam 120R engine linked to a 6-speed manual transmission, which gives the bike a power output of 140 ps and 190 Nm of torque. Not quite Aventador levels, but for a motorcycle it’s not half bad. The performance of the bike was not necessarily the main goal of the build, but the appearance of it was. As per customer specification, the Outerlimit had to exactly match the colors of the supercar, and that task seems to have been met nicely: both the design and the paint job that cover the various portions of the motorcycles body replicate the black and white panels seen on the Aventador body and roof. We’re not being told how much

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Harley-Davidson RS Lambo Is How a Supercar Looks Like on Two Wheels

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by Daniel Patrascu from https://www.autoevolution.com/ For years, our lives have been flooded with incredible custom motorcycle builds made in the U.S.A, thanks to the avalanche of TV shows that over the past two decades have focused on the different garages there. But incredible custom bikes are being made elsewhere as well. Germany, for instance, is the place where for the past two decades incredible Harley-based machines came to be. Whether we’re talking about remakes of existing Harleys as a whole, or adaptations of some Harley parts into a custom frame, the things the German garage called Thunderbike can do are incredible. The group has begun toying with motorcycles since the 1980s, when they came into being as a repair shop for Japanese bikes. They kept doing that well until the early 2000s, when a switch to Harleys made the birth of these insane machines possible. We’ve already talked about 2019’s Imola Softail conversion, or the CVO 110-powered Flawless 3, but it’s time for something a bit more extreme, because it seems there are so many ideas popping into the heads of these guys that they even dreamt up a motorcycle dedicated to a supercar manufacturer. Enter the RS Lambo, a Thunderbike design created as a “tribute custom bike to the Italian sports car manufacturer [from] Sant’Agata Bolognese.” The build uses an older Thunderbike frame kit called Dragster RS, inside which the engine and transmission from the Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle 110 series were fitted. The frame rides on Lowrider wheels and an air suspension that allows ride height to be adjusted in order to increase or decrease ground clearance. The Lamborghini tribute can of course be seen as the paint chosen for the fuel tank, frame, and even wheel rims. As many other Thunderbike builds, this is not just a custom

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