Ducati 750SS Cafe Racer – Design

This is a new build that will likely start in the middle of the year for a customer in Switzerland. This customer is lucky enough to have an example of the 1989 Ducati 750ss as seen below

What the client is looking to achieve is a cool minimalist cafer racer from the classic styled 1980′s Ducati.  The first thing we did was have a long chat about how the bike should look and some detials of the types of componentst to be used, then I set about pencil sketching some designs of what the bike might looks like.

So here is a later version of my early pencil sketches

The next step is to have the bike rendered so you can better see the dtails and the colour scheme. In this case there were 2 sketches done, … Read More »

Nero Superleggera – Vincent Into

This story starts way back in the late 1940′s and for those not as familiar with the Vincent marque, Vincents were the fastest and some of the most legendary motorcycle of all time, with production bikes being offered for sale with easy 100mph perfermance and claims of 150mph for the top spec bikes being the Black Lightning and that was way back in the 1940′s when the next fastest thing on 2 wheels was good for about 80mph or so. The Vincent’s place in history was helped by the achievements of motorcycle legend, land speed record holder and dare devil Mr Rollie Free.

Rollie Free set a motorcycle land speed record on a Vincent Black Lightning 998cc production race bike, which was shipped direct from the factory in the UK to the USA, un-crated, un-tested and wheeled straight onto the salt of Lake Bonneville and promptly set a world speed record, … Read More »

The CBX 1000 Cafe Racer is a bike commissioned by a customer in Australia after reading about Taimoshan the Super Cafe Racer in an Australian motorcycle publication.

As it happened this customer had a couple of Pro-link CBX 1000′s  sitting in his garage waiting for a little magic.

Above we have an early rendered sketch of the bike design, very much along the lines of the famous Honda RC 161 & 166, 6 cylinder racing machine of the factory honda race team, but in a much more brutal form, as these early RC racers were only 250cc.

The frame is a one off custom cafe racer style frame, designed especially for the  102kg, 6 cylinder engine and will in the “super cafe racer” style have the most modern up to date front suspension and monster twin disc brakes albeit mounted to 17 inch … Read More »

It all started about 12 months ago with a crazy idea,  after  lifting my Triumph Bonneville OIF project with the engine casing installed up onto the bench and nearly giving myself a hernia.

There’s  got to be a way of making this thing lighter.. MUCH lighter.  The std frame and swingarm weighs in at about 20kgs.  Not one to shy away from an engineering challenge I decided design and build a super light carbon fibre OIF Bonneville frame, with a carbon fibre mono-shock rear end , carbon tank and carbon seat etc, the “full bag of fruit” as they say! my target was a bike with a dry weight of 100-110kgs, so about the weight of a modern KTM Supermoto and with a solid 50+bhp from the SRM rebuilt motor, it should make for a pretty lively runner.

Design wise, I … Read More »

The RS250 – Cafe Fighter Intro

Here we have one of the legendary Aprilia RS250’s set up as a dedicated race & track bike, with Fibre glass fairing, tuned pipes, pre-mix only and stripped of all unnecessary equipment such as speedo and lights

These bikes are built for speed and have the reputation as being one of the best handling bikes ever built as they can carry huge corner speed.

So you might as what you can do to customise these RS250’s , well many go with the Tyga body kit and or shoe horn in the or Gamma GR500 motor to make themselves an RS500, but I am not going down this road, I am planning something a little more extreme in the styling department.

The look I am after is what I am going to call a Cafe Fighter, a hybrid … Read More »

Triumph Thunderbird – Cafe Racer – pt 2

Here you can see the polished  front end, machined new side brackets to fit the 8 inch

Headlight, repro classic Triumph Bonneville gauges in a custom mount still to come and re-painted  brake

Calipers and caliper mounts.

For those with a keen eye you will have also noticed that I have changed the rear subframe

Swapping the “sport” sub frame for the legend sub frame which has exhaust hangers on either

Side of the bike. I have also changed the pipes for a set of staintune stainless legend

Pipes that run one pipe out either side of the bike in a more traditional cafe racer style.

There are of course a few more ticks to come, including a Meccatwin style single seat unit to

Be painted in matching metal flake black, Tail tidy, mini indicators, shortened front fender,

carbon fibre side covers … Read More »

Triumph Thunderbird – Cafe Racer Intro

The Thunderbird sport is one of those diamonds in the rough kind of bikes, it looked OK, but not

as awesome as std, but it has so much more potential, with the rock solid reliable Triumph 900

triple motor punching out about 95bhp.  The sport frame has the mono shock rear end and the very

much sort after fully adjustable twin disc front end. The problem with this bike is that the bars

Are too high and the rear fender too big and it looks a little too “harley” cruiser for my liking.

There are some really nice cafe racer conversions that have been done, with owner throwing mega bucks

At their bike to make the bike nice and good on them!

I think these Thunderbird Sports can be toughened up quite a lot and turned into a serious looking

Cafe racers … Read More »