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Okay, I know the magazine is called American-V but I’m going to indulge myself for a moment and talk about some of the bikes in the World Championship of Custom Bike Building that are not built around Milwaukee’s best known export.
After last year’s winning bike which used Honda internals in a one-off crank case, Dave Cook has gone more conventional for 2010 and built one of his long and low bikes around an 850cc Norton twin.
Another builder to go down the Norton twin route is Austrian shop Blech & Druber, whose bike is the polar opposite in design terms. While the look may be traditional chopper, long forks and a high neck, the materials are more up-to-date with liberal use of stainless steel and aluminium.
The British flag is also being flown by Seattle’s Speed Shop Design’s Beezerker, which, as the name suggests, has BSA 650 unit construction motor. The deceptively simple looking bike is one that needs to be studied in-depth before the true level of craftsmanship and detailing can be appreciated.
One bike that started people scratching their heads at the European Championship of Custom Bike Building, and which continues to do so at the World Championship, is the Hungarian built Simson. The art deco influenced bike takes its name from the four-stroke, single cylinder motor that no one outside of Germany ever seems to have heard of.
I’ll finish up by trying to get things slightly back on track with the JRL Cycles’ Lucky 7. If you think of several V-twins joined together in a circle you can get an idea of what a Rotec aero engine looks like and that’s what powers this bike. The seven-cylinder bike may look unrideable but it is and I’ve seen. Even more bizarre is the version on the Procharger display, outside the show hall, which has had a supercharger bolted to the engine.
After last year’s winning bike which used Honda internals in a one-off crank case, Dave Cook has gone more conventional for 2010 and built one of his long and low bikes around an 850cc Norton twin.
Another builder to go down the Norton twin route is Austrian shop Blech & Druber, whose bike is the polar opposite in design terms. While the look may be traditional chopper, long forks and a high neck, the materials are more up-to-date with liberal use of stainless steel and aluminium.
The British flag is also being flown by Seattle’s Speed Shop Design’s Beezerker, which, as the name suggests, has BSA 650 unit construction motor. The deceptively simple looking bike is one that needs to be studied in-depth before the true level of craftsmanship and detailing can be appreciated.
One bike that started people scratching their heads at the European Championship of Custom Bike Building, and which continues to do so at the World Championship, is the Hungarian built Simson. The art deco influenced bike takes its name from the four-stroke, single cylinder motor that no one outside of Germany ever seems to have heard of.
I’ll finish up by trying to get things slightly back on track with the JRL Cycles’ Lucky 7. If you think of several V-twins joined together in a circle you can get an idea of what a Rotec aero engine looks like and that’s what powers this bike. The seven-cylinder bike may look unrideable but it is and I’ve seen. Even more bizarre is the version on the Procharger display, outside the show hall, which has had a supercharger bolted to the engine.
2 comments:
Hey Duncan, what about the twin-engined Cossack. It's officially the end of the world: a Cossack winning the metric class??
And what's a BSA doing in the Metric class ... mind you, it's going to start getting messy soon: with a wider range of engines being used, the classic classes will be irrelevant: a V-Rod's largely metric while a Norton, Triumph and BSA isn't.
The real winner is diversity in this truly international competition.
Don't shoot the messneger. I'm not the one who decided on the class definitions.
Now that 'Cossack', at first I thought it was a pair of Ural motors but Yuri, the builder, told me in a mixture of Russian, English and Italian, via a couple of other people translating, that they are BMW engines and who am I to argue?
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