Chuck78
Been Around the Block
I thought I'd stir the pot a little in the "anything goes" section of the forum and echo the sentiments of most of the veteran members of here and the other big cafe racer forum, due to observations and further realizations in recent times.
My buddy and I were chatting the other day about this, and he mentioned that every single time he finds any decent pictures or videos of his model of bike, a 78 Suzuki GS550C, they are all franken-cafe's... he rarely ever sees a tastefully modded and unmolested nice project build, they are typically all permanently maimed poorly engineered builds with generic typical "Cafe" seat humps and seat cushions that are no good for any longer distance than riding from one cafe (or rather, bar) to the next... bikes with 27 or 28 degree frame rake, running forks that are way way too short to ever make the bike handle around corners with any decent lean angle, and running triple clamps for those forks that have so little offset (intended for 23.5 or 24 degree rake frames and a 120/70-17 tire) that the stock frame rake or even steepened a bit through ride height/stance alterations will generate a substantially higher trail geometry figure than stock, making a front end that not only steers like an old man harley cruiser or a dump truck, but also kills any real sporty lean angle when swapping a modern inverted fork front end onto a bike that is a poor fit for such a thing... Not to mention this in conjunction with ultra stiff cheapo $79 rear shocks, or if they're lucky, RFY shocks rebuilt from new (properly) and rebranded by Chris Livengood... hopefully with a spring rate that compliments the weight of the bike and the rider and the swingarm leverage ratio...
Worst of all, the first thing done is as we always fear, the hacksaw and angle grinder and self taught Harbor Freight "MIG" welder (flux cored) lessons come before ever riding the bike and getting it in tip top shape... rendering the bike permanently devalued unless it is done by a world class builder and sold in New York or the greater Los Angeles area to a rich hipster...
The even better part of this is... this same friend who had this realization while chatting with me, just a year ago was so enamored by all of the cafe racer bikes... until he actually got his first vintage bike of decent performance pedigree, his first bike ever, period. Then he started seeing all of these generic chop&downgrade themes to most bikes of that style... and started looking at more of the 70's classics and appreciating the semi-stock look and stylings of the good builds or even mostly stock bikes...
Yeah, so....
I vote that if you fit any of the above description - or at least the general description not caring about enhancing (or rather detracting from instead) the performance of the bike to begin with, but rather just build a bike that rolls down the road when you twist the throttle and looks cool, and has the aggressive aesthetic that you desire to carve and shape it into, then please reconsider chopping up awesome old UJM's and start out with something a little more off the beaten path, or at least, if you love the Japanese inline fours or parallel twins for your build, pick the ones that are turds from the factory like the GS###L models or the KZ###LTD or CSR models... Not the ones that take very little alterations from stock to make them even more classic (flattening the seat cushions, superbike bars, lowering the gauge mounting position, smaller/shorter turn signals or none- hand signals)
These classic UJM's are becoming more and more scarce now, I have seriously noticed a HUGE decrease this year in the amount of project bikes that I'd like to buy on craigslist and fix up for friends or flip. Many would have beens are now cafe looking bikes that don't run right and need mechanical work and have the back of the frame gone and a skateboard with 1/2" of foam and leather/vinyl on top for a seat... or with a DIY fiberglass job humper on the back.
SSSSOOOOOOO many of these bikes have been parted out now and are gone forever (ever look on ebay for parts??? Extreme proof), hacked up into cafe art bike perpetual projects, or even exported back to Japan where you could not buy a Japanese 550, 650, 750, 900, 1000, 1100 etc bike back in the day due to the 400cc limits in some countries... a good fella that I know makes a real good living income solely buying bikes in all over the USA, and exporting them back to Japan. I have seen one other guy locally who does the same thing, and that is not to mention others like the Japanese guy who showed up to AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days a few years ago with a giant shipping container trailer, and filled the entire thing full with almost every single good project bike for sale in the 22+ acre swap meet, all bought the very first day of the swap meet in the early AM, before hardly any enthusiasts or cafe-wannabe art-bike makers could even have a shot at buying anything good... I'm dead serious about these great vintage bikes now becoming both scarce and headng toward the more expensive end of things... meanwhile, one that is chopped up into a bobtailed cafe frame with a dented 4-1 exhaust and forks several inches shorter than the frame needs, will be not worth very much still at the time when a stock example is worth SUBSTANTIALLY more than it was just a few years earlier due to the economics of supply and demand.
How about this idea which I fully endorse. Start building cafe art bikes out of other models like Honda Rebels, single cylinder bikes like the LS650 Savage, Yamaha Virago (I've seen some really great looking Cafe'd Virago's), etc
Or the one that I appreciate the most - take a modern bike like a Suzuki Bandit or Suzuki GS500, and build a rad retro style cafe racer themed bike out of them... then you have a substantially more ultimate performance package to begin with that has the same look as the modern parts you would attempt to graft to a vintage bike, and you can work some cosmetic magic out of the rest of it... and you get better parts availability to boot! You don't need to worry about mis-matched steering geometries, because you already have ultra wide 17" wheels and a modern large diameter fork, more advanced engine, more horsepower, and a stiffer more advanced frame... I for one don't care for the look of most modern sports bikes, but I do appreciate the performance. The Japanese exporters aren't trying to snatch up Suzuki GS500's, SV650's, or air cooled Bandits... These bikes are all varying degrees of awesome from a performance standpoint, so the challenge now is to make the look like killer retro cafe racers or retro REAL racers that one could sit on and race around backroads for hours or do an endurance race on and still be able to walk straight and sit on their hind end afterwards
I realize this will, to many (mostly youngsters), be a controversial topic, but I think it needs to have some more light shed on it, as I bring up some grim realizations for those of us who would rather be able to go and buy a nice CB750, KZ550, GS1000, etc for a fair and affordable price, instead of scouring the whole country and paying a very substantial price or having to even ship a bike cross country, adding to the cost and never seeing it in person beforehand... I'm also of the opinion of many realists amongst us who are all tired of perpetually seeing these awesome old bikes hacked up into rookie non-mechanic amateur cafe build disfigured orphans. I'm trying to keep the bashing to a minimum here and keep it more cordial in an attempt to have serious conversations about this.
I prefer to get my kicks adding or making bolt-on performance mods and upgrades to these classy bikes, restoring them to fairly stock appearance with some functionality/reliability mods, and ripping around the backcountry on my own resto-mod builds in a very sporty manner and tweaking out on the adrenaline induced from such a capable vintage machine, as well as getting extreme life/world/Trump-America therapy through spending endless hours wrenching on these awesome classics. I can only hope that there will be a fair amount of un-maimed examples of these bikes left on the road and/or for sale in the distant future.
To Be Continued....
My buddy and I were chatting the other day about this, and he mentioned that every single time he finds any decent pictures or videos of his model of bike, a 78 Suzuki GS550C, they are all franken-cafe's... he rarely ever sees a tastefully modded and unmolested nice project build, they are typically all permanently maimed poorly engineered builds with generic typical "Cafe" seat humps and seat cushions that are no good for any longer distance than riding from one cafe (or rather, bar) to the next... bikes with 27 or 28 degree frame rake, running forks that are way way too short to ever make the bike handle around corners with any decent lean angle, and running triple clamps for those forks that have so little offset (intended for 23.5 or 24 degree rake frames and a 120/70-17 tire) that the stock frame rake or even steepened a bit through ride height/stance alterations will generate a substantially higher trail geometry figure than stock, making a front end that not only steers like an old man harley cruiser or a dump truck, but also kills any real sporty lean angle when swapping a modern inverted fork front end onto a bike that is a poor fit for such a thing... Not to mention this in conjunction with ultra stiff cheapo $79 rear shocks, or if they're lucky, RFY shocks rebuilt from new (properly) and rebranded by Chris Livengood... hopefully with a spring rate that compliments the weight of the bike and the rider and the swingarm leverage ratio...
Worst of all, the first thing done is as we always fear, the hacksaw and angle grinder and self taught Harbor Freight "MIG" welder (flux cored) lessons come before ever riding the bike and getting it in tip top shape... rendering the bike permanently devalued unless it is done by a world class builder and sold in New York or the greater Los Angeles area to a rich hipster...
The even better part of this is... this same friend who had this realization while chatting with me, just a year ago was so enamored by all of the cafe racer bikes... until he actually got his first vintage bike of decent performance pedigree, his first bike ever, period. Then he started seeing all of these generic chop&downgrade themes to most bikes of that style... and started looking at more of the 70's classics and appreciating the semi-stock look and stylings of the good builds or even mostly stock bikes...
Yeah, so....
I vote that if you fit any of the above description - or at least the general description not caring about enhancing (or rather detracting from instead) the performance of the bike to begin with, but rather just build a bike that rolls down the road when you twist the throttle and looks cool, and has the aggressive aesthetic that you desire to carve and shape it into, then please reconsider chopping up awesome old UJM's and start out with something a little more off the beaten path, or at least, if you love the Japanese inline fours or parallel twins for your build, pick the ones that are turds from the factory like the GS###L models or the KZ###LTD or CSR models... Not the ones that take very little alterations from stock to make them even more classic (flattening the seat cushions, superbike bars, lowering the gauge mounting position, smaller/shorter turn signals or none- hand signals)
These classic UJM's are becoming more and more scarce now, I have seriously noticed a HUGE decrease this year in the amount of project bikes that I'd like to buy on craigslist and fix up for friends or flip. Many would have beens are now cafe looking bikes that don't run right and need mechanical work and have the back of the frame gone and a skateboard with 1/2" of foam and leather/vinyl on top for a seat... or with a DIY fiberglass job humper on the back.
SSSSOOOOOOO many of these bikes have been parted out now and are gone forever (ever look on ebay for parts??? Extreme proof), hacked up into cafe art bike perpetual projects, or even exported back to Japan where you could not buy a Japanese 550, 650, 750, 900, 1000, 1100 etc bike back in the day due to the 400cc limits in some countries... a good fella that I know makes a real good living income solely buying bikes in all over the USA, and exporting them back to Japan. I have seen one other guy locally who does the same thing, and that is not to mention others like the Japanese guy who showed up to AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days a few years ago with a giant shipping container trailer, and filled the entire thing full with almost every single good project bike for sale in the 22+ acre swap meet, all bought the very first day of the swap meet in the early AM, before hardly any enthusiasts or cafe-wannabe art-bike makers could even have a shot at buying anything good... I'm dead serious about these great vintage bikes now becoming both scarce and headng toward the more expensive end of things... meanwhile, one that is chopped up into a bobtailed cafe frame with a dented 4-1 exhaust and forks several inches shorter than the frame needs, will be not worth very much still at the time when a stock example is worth SUBSTANTIALLY more than it was just a few years earlier due to the economics of supply and demand.
How about this idea which I fully endorse. Start building cafe art bikes out of other models like Honda Rebels, single cylinder bikes like the LS650 Savage, Yamaha Virago (I've seen some really great looking Cafe'd Virago's), etc
Or the one that I appreciate the most - take a modern bike like a Suzuki Bandit or Suzuki GS500, and build a rad retro style cafe racer themed bike out of them... then you have a substantially more ultimate performance package to begin with that has the same look as the modern parts you would attempt to graft to a vintage bike, and you can work some cosmetic magic out of the rest of it... and you get better parts availability to boot! You don't need to worry about mis-matched steering geometries, because you already have ultra wide 17" wheels and a modern large diameter fork, more advanced engine, more horsepower, and a stiffer more advanced frame... I for one don't care for the look of most modern sports bikes, but I do appreciate the performance. The Japanese exporters aren't trying to snatch up Suzuki GS500's, SV650's, or air cooled Bandits... These bikes are all varying degrees of awesome from a performance standpoint, so the challenge now is to make the look like killer retro cafe racers or retro REAL racers that one could sit on and race around backroads for hours or do an endurance race on and still be able to walk straight and sit on their hind end afterwards
I realize this will, to many (mostly youngsters), be a controversial topic, but I think it needs to have some more light shed on it, as I bring up some grim realizations for those of us who would rather be able to go and buy a nice CB750, KZ550, GS1000, etc for a fair and affordable price, instead of scouring the whole country and paying a very substantial price or having to even ship a bike cross country, adding to the cost and never seeing it in person beforehand... I'm also of the opinion of many realists amongst us who are all tired of perpetually seeing these awesome old bikes hacked up into rookie non-mechanic amateur cafe build disfigured orphans. I'm trying to keep the bashing to a minimum here and keep it more cordial in an attempt to have serious conversations about this.
I prefer to get my kicks adding or making bolt-on performance mods and upgrades to these classy bikes, restoring them to fairly stock appearance with some functionality/reliability mods, and ripping around the backcountry on my own resto-mod builds in a very sporty manner and tweaking out on the adrenaline induced from such a capable vintage machine, as well as getting extreme life/world/Trump-America therapy through spending endless hours wrenching on these awesome classics. I can only hope that there will be a fair amount of un-maimed examples of these bikes left on the road and/or for sale in the distant future.
To Be Continued....