millarmachine

In my previous post I stated I was in the hunt for a project bike, likely a Café Racer. A successful hunt requires knowledge of the prey, so in the last few days I’ve been researching various bikes, in the process I’ve found some real gems of moto history. This may make you laugh, but this is why I love bikes so much, the “ingenuity/craziness/stupidity/because I can” behind some designs:

Taken from Caferacer.ca:

This MV Augusta 60cc Monomoto Superleggera is the experimental machine ridden by young wealthy Italian Luiggi Bandini, during practice for the 1954 Milano-Taranto Road Race. Bandini tragically lost control in a misty mountain section, while waving to a pretty spectator.
Read more.

I’ll be doing a series of posts on the gems I find, along with project candidates in the coming weeks. Do I dare build a Monomoto? Is it safe? As long as I avoid pretty spectators.

So I met my cousin-in-law last night, being a motorcycle guy we talked about bikes, in fact that was just about all we talked about. Something he said to me got me thinking today “…you need a project bike…”. Indeed. I’ve been thinking about this for a few months, but here’s my problem: I love bikes. Not just one type of bike, but all bikes, so what do I build?

I don’t want the ordinary, choppers are overdone - like a cliché, same goes for bobbers, besides I’m probably nowhere near cool enough. I’ve considered a fully built RC51, not my bike, but a second ground up street legal race bike - outside my budget. Vintage bikes are OK but I have this thing for custom parts, I’m no purest. Supermoto’s don’t really classify as a project bike in my view, something you swap some parts on, make some suspension changes and you’re backing it in faster than you can say “this thing is more fun than riding your sister!”.

Café Racers are cool, something that I could take some time in fabricating a few parts by hand while adding my own ideas to what a bike should be. Again I find myself in a pinch, what kind of Café? I love the old Manx, so a Manx inspired bike would be cool, I also dig CB750’s, but a CBX Café would be way cooler with six megaphones hanging out the back. Triton you say? Mmmm… yeah, that be cool, the epitome of the Café. Then there was this ultra slick Kawasaki two stroke 750 triple Café that I saw on eBay a few weeks back… I could go on, but I won’t.

Point is, that almost anything is possible in the world of bikes, given the time and the cash, so what do I build? I guess I’ll keep looking for a decent project bike/basket case and I’ll know it when I see it. I’ll be posting the project here when I get it started.