Re: DECEMBER BIKE OF THE MONTH - VOTE HERE!
Loudbike:
Sat in a barn for about a year before I got to it. I'm not sure why it didn't run but a big part of it was that the ignition switch was rotted all to hell. The PO decided it needed to be black... everything needed to be black, I disagreed.
I learned to ride a motorcycle on this version:
Now: *ftp site is unstable today, these are going in and out*
This is the article I wrote for The Horse, they titled it
The Japs Are Coming! which was the subject line of the first e mail I sent to them:
My dad was never into this motor stuff, what he gave me instead was a drive to build, fabricate, and create. It started early with plastic models and at some point I discovered motors… much of what followed, up until today is a blur. Thank Bob Dole for the internet where I decided to document it all, otherwise I wouldn't know what to write in these pages.
Back in 2004 after returning from Daytona bike week I was ready to find myself a bike. I didn't know what I was looking for but I knew I'd know it when I saw it. When I came across the bike you see here it was sitting outside of a computer store not running, rattle canned black, and boring as stock can be, it was perfect. I could see the bike that I wanted it to be within it, underneath all the junk that Honda piled on it so many years ago, I was sure there was something cool. The next weekend it was spread all over the garage floor an there was a bucket of spare parts that weighed in at about twenty pounds. Project Loudbike had begun.
Having slapped it all back together leaving out anything I felt wasn't absolutely necessary I rode it until the motor gave out on my about a month later. Too many revs for too long on the highway did it in. Having done away with the clocks I can't ever tell what It's revving at or even how fast I'm going, so I might have had the thing pegged for who knows how long. The breakdown was my opportunity, and that's when the whole thing really started to come apart. I broke it down completely and painted the frame with the biggest HOK flake I could get through my gun, stripped the tank, made a new seat from scratch, installed new bars and flipped them under, got all new spokes, a new rim and had all the rolling stock powder-coated gloss and satin black. I thought maybe it was best to try the professionals this time for the motor. One of the employees of a local Triumph specialty shop decided he could take it on as a personal project, so I handed it over, and never saw it again. He moved to Georgia in the middle of rebuilding it and took the motor with him. By this time I had gotten my hands on another CL360 basket case and quickly robbed the motor out of that one, but I never could get it to run right and I eventually found myself on Craigslist throwing money at a go cart motor. That's right, a 360 powered, long wheelbase, sand dragging, backyard built go cart. That's the motor that's still in it to this day and all it needed was a little Scotch Brite lovin'.
Loudbike is the first of many Dropbars Bikeworks projects. I was able to learn a lot about what the hobby needs, and have a number of pieces in the works to help keep these bikes on the road. There's only so much space in these pages and I was really only able to touch the surface. For more info on Loudbikes' build, any of the other projects going on at Dropbars, or just to ogle more pictures of our model Rain check out www.dropbars.com
(Sorry, this is a lie, I still haven't been able to get a decent gallery working on my website). My thanks goes out to Rain and my photographer Darren Mcabee for helping me out.
Kit, Dropbars Bikeworks
