I kinda like the lowered stance, it's a little more like an old UJM. What I've always wanted to do with a modern crotch-rocket, is style it up like a '70s UJM from it's own heritage, without the stripped down cafe racer thing, but rather with the original classic bug antenae stalk signal lights and shit. Those things are cheap enough to source. Then, I'd take the stock fender braces and fit them up with either cut-down or aftermarket fibre-glas old-school style fenders with that new faux chrome crap on them. Maybe take all of the alloy parts and polish 'em up? Especially on the engine bits, side covers and valve covers. Then the body-work side covers could be sculpted out of florist-foam and skinned in fibre-glas, again, in a bulbous old-school style. Then, IF I had a crap load of dough left over, it would be nice to weld up the bottom half of the oem tank to the top half of an old tank off of say, a GS750 or GT750, or even just some chrome side panels on the oem tank, again sculpted out of fibre-glas and faux-chrome and shit. Some old school badges, they make the badges now with custom letters and numbers with the old fonts and stuff, maybe some rubber knee pads on the tank, some bolt-up risers with a super-bike bar or better still a club-man just to get back where the stock clip-ons were, and a nice old master cylinder with the round alloy res on it, old switch pods in polished alloy, mirrors grips etc etc. Maybe go with some fork shrouds or boots if shrouds wouldn't work? The new USD forks only look cool cause they imitate the old covered forks, but they never have matched paint so they don't pull it off. Fork "ears" on a headlight bucket, maybe a plexi-glas wind-shield bolted up to the fork or better still the handlebars. And the ass end of the thing you'd wanna fit a reproduction seat cover, cut down of course, over another chunk of bondo. Main costs would be the second-hand UJM parts and the bondo and the parts sent in for the cheapo fake chrome. Floral foam ain't cheap either. Still, I think it would yield a really cool old school bike. If you REALLY wanted to go overboard, then wire spoked wheels would cap it all off. BUT, being in the middle of a wire wheel swap on my old DOHC cb750f right now, I'd advise people to go with Harley hubs, as they'd save you a butt-load on the spokes and rims. Then you'd only need to make custom adapters for non-harley brake rotors so the wheels wouldn't look like ass. The Harley hubs themselves are nice and small, it's just the honkin' big spacers they use so they can make cheap-assed flat plate brake rotors in a zillion different head-bangin' styles on a water jet cutter. Still, many of these hubs are five bolt or even six bolt, so I am sure that manyfloating rotors could be bolted up. The inch-spec bearings could be sourced for nice metric axles, and even up to a good thick axle too, 'cause they're a good fat axle anyway. Just trust me, even with all of the crap you'd have to deal with, Harley hubs would be the most simple way to go about it. Even if you needed to bolt on a cush drive cut down from another type of hub, due to the Harley hubs not having cush drives on them.... Okay, maybe at that point you'd wanna spend a little more and use a UJM hub of some type, but you'd be looking at easily another couple or three hundred PER WHEEL to go with a custom wheel with UJM hub. Pre-fab Harley wheels can be sourced with tube-less sealing on them, though only in limited sizes of rims. Still, it would work out. If you ask ME, you wanna go with the 18" rims anyway, just to get the '70s look on wheels like that. But hey, you really don't need to go that far with the thing anyway. It would be uber-cool in the first place, just to get the bodywork lookin' old-school in the first place. There are just so many so-called customs nowadays, where all people are doing is cutting shit off and capping off the holes they leave in the process. It's far more involved to ADD shit to the bike, without making it butt-fugly. But look at the new duc GT1000 touring bike, so many of us have stared longingly at those adverts, haven't we? THAT bike has shit on it which you could throw at ANY modern bike and it would come off amazing looking. But take it a step further, and style the bike to look like it's distant ancestor, and it's a winner. I figure all of the crap I'm trying to do with my DOHC supersport could work out on a fireblade or blackbird, with the exception of the tubular frame and the air-cooled motor. Still, that doesn't really matter, when you consider how many cool old bikes have water cooling, two strokes, pressed steel frames, perimeter frames, etc etc etc. It's all just a question of styling, really. When I first saw what were later called street fighters, back in the early '90s, they reminded me of race bikes from the UJM super-bike era. And if you feel, as I do, that street fighters have really lost touch with their roots, and become an icon of total Chachi fuckin' gold-chains and dripping permed out hair with designer running shoes fucking Vanilla Ice closet-case bling-bling, then you might wanna think a little longer before you just cut down the sub-frame so the tail end of your bike sticks up like the tail of a scorpion. Yeah? Right. Just MY two bits.
Oh, and as for the frame damage in the swinger zone, I'd have the car-fax checked on that bike, to see if it's been in a fender-bender. Maybe the missing bits disppeared from in there AFTER the bike was bent!
-S.