Cafe Racers

[Sailariel]

Originally Posted by edwinmcq

This one is kind of nice, in a brute force in your face sort of way.

Ed, That bike looks ferocious just standing still. In motion, it would be an OMG!

[ninja3575]

In response to the original thread question... Before getting my Kawi 250... I wanted a cafe racer... Something about how raw they looked appealed to me. When time and funds permit I'll be building or having one built... preferably the former.. The one in the picture is a beauty...

[ninja3575]

Originally Posted by backinthesaddleagain

Anyone watch the Cafe Racer tv show? They take anything from old XS650, CB750, one guy is really into CB450.

I've watched a couple episodes ... great show... keeps the dream alive... if this bug catches... we may have to rename this forum to Caferider.org

[bob138]

I put clubmans on my ex500 and stripped it down to only the bare necessities. Ended up swapping out the clubmans for dirtbike bars. It's funny, I felt more like a hooligan with the dirt bars for some reason than with the clubmans. That and the clubmans made my back wrists and arms hurt.

Bob

[ChaosFromAbove]

Originally Posted by ninja3575

I've watched a couple episodes ... great show... keeps the dream alive... if this bug catches... we may have to rename this forum to Caferider.org

hmmm i think im gonna buy the domain

[ninja3575]

Originally Posted by ChaosFromAbove

hmmm i think im gonna buy the domain

Well then... I better hurry on up and beat ya to it !

[SV-Mark]

it's allready covered at dotheton.com

[Racer x]

This is what I have so far. The rear seat and cowl hinge up from the tank. I can put a cushion on the seat pan . But for racing I just sit on the aluminum pan.when I put this on the street .The blinkers and brake lights will be LEDs inside the rear frame tubes.

[Cab305]

Nothing to say but, Damnnnnnnn!

[Cab305]

Originally Posted by Racer x

This is what I have so far.

[Racer x]

Originally Posted by Cab305

Nothing to say but, Damnnnnnnn!

That rocks . ..Thanks

[spooph]

That's a seriously cool bike!

[Alex]

Agreed! That rocks....

[Samer]

Cab, is that bike made for straight roads only? Look at those tires! It's a nice looking bike though.

[CC Cowboy]

I wonder where the Bos brothers get their gear.

[wild-bill]

I like the pics in this thread. Is the S40 the one Suzuki used to call the Savage?

[Cab305]

Originally Posted by Samer

Cab, is that bike made for straight roads only? Look at those tires! It's a nice looking bike though.

It's described as a boardtracker instead of a cafe racer.
Here is the link and wait till you read about the builder.

http://www.pipeburn.com/home/2010/11...rdtracker.html

[CC Cowboy]

Hunter S. Thompson on Cafe Racers
« on: Aug 07, 2010, 20:04:07 »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Song of the Sausage Creature
by Hunter S. Thompson

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering **** out of you… There is, after all, not a pig’s eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I’d rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. “Hot damn,” they said. “We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away.”

“Balls,” I said. “Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers.”

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures… I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple… I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called “Bess” sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he’ll think it’s a streetbike. He’s queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as “the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine.” I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid… I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy… And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of “chicken” at 100 miles an hour….

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it… For that we need Fine Machinery.

Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they’re world-class Cafe Racers.

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn’t find… I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.



I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, ****ed-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that… But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm….

And that’s when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn’t get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you’re ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry… I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature….

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho… We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever’s funny. We **** on the chests of the Weird….

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it’s right. The final measure of any rider’s skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things… It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn’t ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, “IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.”

[sharky nrk]

they have an article about the kit you can use to turn a s40/savage into a decent looking little cafe single in motorcyclist this month. its a decent write up

[Cab305]

The Thompson article is awesome.

Hope you don't mind Cowboy as usual I'll be posting this on my local forum.

[Racer x]

Did a mock up of my "Cafe Ninja" today.I need to check clearance of some parts and thought it would be a good time to get some photos.

[Sailariel]

Eric, A splendid job! Lines look a lot like the Norton Manx of the 60s. Just from what I see in the pictures, the end result should be absolutely stunning. You have a real talent. (I'm jealous)

[yokozuna]

ninja 250 09, cafe racer

[grandelatte]

Originally Posted by Cab305

^ That is awesome, what is source? ...

looks like this is it. but not much there tho...

http://daddynaeva.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/the-most-sexiest-ninja-250-ever/

[Daeldren]

One of my favorite savage builds, he has the complete build on Savage forums. And he has a custom swingarm with a monoshock on that bike.

My savage is bone stock as far as mods go and it will still pull like a mule up to 60, that big bore thumper is all torque. They aren't high speed engines though, with heavy mods you can coax 100mph out of them but thats about it without sacrificing reliability.

The CCT is the ticking time bomb on those motors though, all the savage guys have replaced the stock units with the Verslagen modified CCT.

[sharky nrk]

^^ kinda a strange looking build. Unique though for sure.

[europachris]

I've gotten hooked on "Motorcycle Classics" magazine lately, and so far each issue has some sort of "old school" cafe racer and a couple of "new school" versions as well. The latest issue has the Norton Commando 961 - WOW! road-test-norton-961-commando-cafe-racer. But it's close to $20K . Still nice to look at, though.

[spooph]

Chris, I'm a Motorcycle Classics fan too! Been on that magazine for 2 years now.

[coondog]

This being a 250 site and also my favorite size bike, I'll take a 66 honda six (166). I can't imagine anyone approaching one of these little terrors, seeing two triple rows of cans on either side and thinking 250. My 250 now hasn't been beaten and I beleive the honda 166 swept its class that year as well. My back prevents a caff-setup on my ninja but I don't need one. Plus where's the competition anyway. Love all you guys and your dreams, wishes and realities. My 500 and 250 are on my profile page, I'm also a techno tard. Happy trails.

[Racer x]

The Honda 166 is a thing of dreams. 20,000 rpm and the sound is art .
\
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBrb93O_Xg0

These are my bikes I am trying to make a cafe racer out of a 250 ninja. First of all they are racers.I use them for land speed racing. I will work on the cafe part later when I put lights and blinkers on them.when I retire them.

I still have a lot of work to do and a lot has been done since these photos where taken.
The #2 bike is going to get a rear seat part .Check out the pipes one with the red wheels . Hand made megaphone pipes .Just like the 166. The sound at 15000 RPM is great.

[coondog]

I've been pulled over on I95 several times and told that's the loudest bike I've ever heard, (plus 40+ over the speed limit means serious sh*t), and i tell the trooper it's just because he was right behind is all. My State Troop L I.D. saves me but I stopped going out whenever I wanted due to the closing of the L station on my stretch of hwy. I was surprised at the like sound of the six and mine, technology surely has come a long way. Great shop by the way, not that I could appreciate it. I do hang with Kart racers, motorcycle maniacs, and even scooter guys who do unbeleivable stuff. When I was a craftsman for the state for certain bldgs. I got into all the tracks for free, Moroso was on the beeline hwy. which is still where everything goes down, usually at night now. It's tough getting old dude (and crippled), like Warren Zevon said "enjoy every sandwich"

[Racer x]

Got the bike out side for the first time. I still need to finish the custom radiator. But for Drag racing this is will do. The next step is to make a fairing head light that looks the part.

[coondog]

freakin' sweet (for me), you too but with blood sweat and jeers. i know you're gonna open some mf'in eyes up dude. ride on.

[KGar]

That was a great series. It was cool seeing Billy Joel and his interest in the cafe scene.

[08ninja250]

Originally Posted by racer x

got the bike out side for the first time. I still need to finish the custom radiator. But for drag racing this is will do. The next step is to make a fairing head light that looks the part.

silver dream racer!

[Live2ride]

Originally Posted by k-os

Do want!

I saw a very similar cafe racer to this that pulled out behind me on my way to class this morning, it looks even better in person.

[phr3ek]

i wanted a vincent black shadow, then i found out how much one costs........$45,000, no joke

i like the ducati sportclassic w/o the upper fairing

[bob138]

Originally Posted by Racer x

Did a mock up of my "Cafe Ninja" today.I need to check clearance of some parts and thought it would be a good time to get some photos.

Looking great!!!! Only thing I noticed is that the tank looks like it needs to be lifted at the back a bit. Just enough to get it level with the ground.

But that's just my opinion

Bob

[Racer x]

Thanks for the input. You are correct that the rear needs to come up . That is a compromise I have to make. The bike is still more racer than cafe at this point. I desined the tank to maximize my riding position. What I did was mount a large block of foam to the frame then cut away the foam untill I could only touch it with my chin.pushing my helmet chin into the tank allow me to see better. I am looking up at the top fork clamp when fully tuked and I have removed the top of the fairing so I can get inside the bodywork.

When everythinh is done and the suspension is set the tank will look a little bit better. But not perfectly level.
One day I will do the cafe part. That will involve adding front brakes lights and a seat with padding. At that point I will mount the tank so it is level.

[slolane]

Very cool project