Finding the Right Bike

Once I made the decision on what style of bike I wanted to build, I had to find the right platform to build it on. I had a good idea of what I wanted, it was just finding it was no easy task. So I made a list of what features the bike had to have in no particular order.

1. It had to be a Japanese liquid cooled inline four.
2. It had to have a six speed transmission.
3. The engine had to be fuel injected.
4. It should have an old school double loop frame.
5. The forks should be on the right way, the way god intended motorcycle forks to be on a bike so that gaiters could be installed.
6. A nice looking double sided swing arm, not an unsightly barstock looking one that is usually installed on most Japanese bikes.
7. Two rear shocks, for that old school look.
8. A round headlight with no fairing.
9. A standard dual gauge cluster.
10. Dual disc brakes in the front, and a single disc on the rear.
11. Chain drive, no rubber band or shaft drive.
12. Be actually built in the 21st century and have been made for several years to ensure parts availability.
13. A standard style gas tank.

I was willing to work with that list some as I knew I wouldn't be able to find the exact bike that would fit everything on my list. However I was very firm on #12. I also own a 1984 Honda VT500FT Ascot.
Which I fixed up, rode for about two years and converted it into a rat bike.

I learned a valuable lesson with that that bike. It's next to impossible to find parts for a twenty-five year old bike made for only two years. What parts you can find on eBay aren't going to be much better than the parts your trying to replace.
So I began to do research. I started buying all the motorcycle magazine buyer's guides and surfing the web looking at reviews. When I learned another interesting fact, motorcycle manufacturers believe that Americans only like three kinds of bikes. Dirt bikes, V-twin cruisers, and plastic clad track missiles. I really couldn't find much in the way of a UJM standard here.
I did narrow it down to three bikes. The discontinued Honda 919 (also called the Hornet), The Kawasaki Z1000, or the Suzuki Bandit. I wasn't crazy about the 919's underseat exhaust, the Z1000 had a weird funky tail end and fairing, and I just didn't like the Suzuki at all. Also, all three of them were next to impossible to find. No dealers with a 75 mile radius of my house had one. So I spent the next nine months searching the cycle traders and online adds looking for a suitable motorcycle.

Introduction

When I was a kid growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, there were two guys in my neighborhood who had the coolest motorcycles. Sure there were several V-twin Harleys, a BMW boxer, an old guy up the street had a Gold Wing, and my dad had a BSA/Triumph styled Yamaha 400cc standard. My dad had several British bikes in the '60s and early "70s, but when they started going out of business, he switched to Yamaha and never looked back.
They all were nice bikes I guess, but none of them appealed to me. I've always thought that V-twins and boxers looked rather ugly and sounded horrible. I did like the look of the parallel twins, the lines and the style looked beautiful, but the sound left something to be desired.
But these two guys had the most beautiful, coolest looking and sounding bike around in my eyes. I Don't remember their names, but I remember their bikes. One was a Honda CB750 and the other was a Suzuki GS1000. While in stock form, they were pretty tame and standard looking Japanese in line fours, but these guys had extensively modified their bikes into entirely different animals. They had ditched their "sit-up and beg" style handlebars for a set of clip-ons for the Suzuki and a set of dropped chromed clubman's on the Honda and moved the foot pegs and controls farther back and up putting themselves into a more aggressive racing riding position. Using the racers mantra, "If it doesn't make it go, it's dead weight." They stripped off such useless items as passenger foot pegs, side panels, air boxes, turn signals, fenders and mudguards. The stock seats were modified too, foam was removed to lower themselves closer to the tank to lower the center of gravity of the bike and improve the handling. Passengers were dead weight as well, and with the passenger pegs removed there wasn't much point in having a seat for a pillion. So they cut down the back of the seat and replacing it with a hump that raised above their butts, to possibly improve aerodynamics but, more likely, it was there to provide a stop for themselves to keep from falling off the back off the bike at high speeds or when doing wheelies.
I wasn't even ten years old when I would stand at the end of our front yard leaning against the split rail fence and watched them race each other up and down the streets. They only raced each other, none of the other motorcycles around could keep up with them. I used to say to myself, "When I grow up, I'm gonna get me a bike just like them."
Well, I did grow up and moved on with my life. I had forgotten all about those guys as I went on with my life. School, establishing a career, and starting a family became more important things. Perhaps it was middle age, when I found myself comfortably set in the world, surfing the net, I ran into several of the cafe racer sites out there and I remembered those two guys and that promise to myself. I didn't want to recreate their old bikes, although the thought did cross my mind. I wanted a modern bike, with modern handling, reliability, and technology with those old school 1970s UJM looks. I wanted to build a modern cafe racer with those retro looks of my youth. So with money in my bank account I began searching for a suitable candidate for my build.