Table of contents for RCBE #24 SPRING 2016 in Retrobike

“The Quake City Rumblers have made an art form of not taking themselves seriously” SOMETIMES we motorcyclists take ourselves too seriously. Whether it’s a restorer thumbing his or her nose at a mild custom, sports riders slagging off Harleys or sad middle-aged keyboard warriors taking cheap shots at hipsters on Facebook, we sometimes lose sight that we all ride bikes for exactly the same reason. Because it’s fun. The team behind Sydney’s Throttle Roll get it. They’re not the first to realise that music and motorcycles go together like engines and oil — live bands were a feature of all the best motorcycle rallies a generation ago — but they’re the first to pull it off in the inner suburbs of Australia’s biggest city. And while it’s centred around the…

“ANOTHER 66 CUSTOM BIKES WERE DISPLAYED THREE-HIGH ON SCAFFOLDING UP NEAR THE STAGE” THE Throttle Roll Street Party is put on by the same crew behind the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride and Sydney Cafe Racers. Even if you didn’t know that, you can tell by the vibe which is overwhelmingly positive. Almost everyone is smiling and having a good time. Like most things these guys touch, the event quickly outgrew in just three years its original venue in the beer garden and car park of the Vic Hotel in inner-city Enmore. Last year’s event was our first, and it was barely manageable (in a good way), especially in surrounding streets jam-packed with bikes. So this year Throttle Roll took over a whole street, Railway Parade in Marrickville in the shadow of…

“AFTER THE EARTHQUAKES, WE’D RACE AROUND THE EMPTY STREETS MAKING AS MUCH NOISE AND CHAOS AS WE LIKED” QUAKE City Rumblers came about when Chris, now the QCR president, bought an old motor scooter at a swap meet, then saw a photo on the net of a guy riding a modified one. We’d never seen anything so awesome or even remotely like it, so Chris started modifying his immediately. You know the story, as soon as one person gets something that’s new and fun, others soon follow suite. At the time, it was just after the big Christchurch earthquakes and we couldn’t drive our modified cars on what were now badly potholed, flooded and cracked roads, which was also part of the appeal. There are now 23 members and we…

“IT’S IMPORTANT TO ENCOURAGE THOSE WHO ARE YOUNG, INEXPERIENCED AND LOW ON FUNDS” PUTTING on an outdoor event is always a gamble on the weather, even in sunny Perth. It had rained on both weekends either side of Ride On 2015, so an indoor venue was considered. But apart from being diffi cult to find, we’d set a precedent that first year by cramming in retro show bikes, stalls, music, food and a lot more on top of a roof in the heart of bustling Fremantle. The unique atmosphere that venue helped create was hard to ignore, so we decided to roll the dice again, and won because it rained either side of the 2016 show too! So when the sun set over the Indian Ocean, the handful of dedicated…

“The change has been awesome, I’ve never enjoyed doing track days so much” EVERY now and then, the planets align and life throws you a home run. It doesn’t happen often but when it does it can be a great thing; add to that luck a motorcycle and things are looking really good. It’s the old story, if you can land a job in an industry where you already have a love and you end up getting paid for doing what you love, then it couldn’t be better, right ? I’ve had that kind of luck a few times over my 58 and something years on this Earth, and I’ve been very lucky to have had such good fortune with work. But good things at some point come to an…

“AFTER ASSEMBLY, WE WERE A LITTLE APPREHENSIVE TO SEE IF THE SHOCK WOULD WORK AS WE’D INTENDED” ONE theme common to all the new breeds of customs is to declutter the rear of the bike. Sidecovers, batteries and airboxes are the first to go, after which the stock seat and supporting sub-frame are binned. The more adventurous then go a step further, often replacing twin-shock swingarms with triangulated monoshocks or rigid rear ends. Old Empire Motorcycles has now taken it a step further, with what looks like a dual-sided swingarm but with no suspension at all! It doesn’t get any less cluttered than that! OEM is a bespoke bike builder based on Great Britain’s east coast. We’ve featured two of their bikes over recent years, the totally radical 900SS-based Typhoon…

“IT WAS OUR FIRST, BARE-FRAME CUSTOM BUILD AND I’M VERY HAPPY WITH THE RESULT” LAVERDAS are hardly common in Australia and custom-framed ones even rarer, but this high-performance Mk3 Motodd built by Brisbane workshop Redax Laverda is up there with any in the world. Red Cawte is a retired oil and gas drilling engineer and lifelong Laverda tragic who has turned his hobby into a business restoring and reconditioning Laverdas. His former day job had him living out of Australia for many years, which has given him an international perspective on life, the universe and sourcing components, as you’ll soon discover. “I started collecting parts from 2010, when we purchased the bare frame while travelling through the UK,” Red says. “I’d always wanted to build a custom-framed Laverda using modern…

“IT ALL WENT WELL UNTIL MY MATE KEV LOST THE FRONT UNDER BRAKES AND WROTE IT OFF” LIKE many bikers, I had the idea of one day doing a project bike. Every bike I’ve owned has been modified to my personal taste and I had talked about wanting to do a proper build for some time. My very supportive, beautiful wife asked me, what was I waiting for? On the BIKE EXIF blog, I stumbled on a custom BMW K100 built by Marc Robrock in Germany. Marc couldn’t see the challenge in taking a nice bike and rebuilding it; instead, he had chosen the ugliest bike he could think of! I was blown away how a K100 could look so good! I found a 1984 K100RS in Adelaide, advertised on…

“WE’RE ALWAYS ARGUING WITH EACH OTHER — GRUMPY OLD MEN HAD NOTHING ON US. BUT WE GET THE RESULT.” THE Grumpy Old Men are a former road-racing sidecar team from the NSW Central Coast who, when the time came to hang up the leathers, found themselves with a shed full of fabricating tools, a lifetime of metalworking skills and all missing the camaraderie of sharing a common purpose. So they set about fixing all that by forming a collective to restore or modify bikes for themselves and their mates. “We built a Honda Bol D’Or for a mate that we showed at Throttle Roll last year,” Scott Gittoes says of a Matchless G50-styled cafe racer that has since featured in a bunch of magazines and blogs. “We sat down afterwards…

“We hatched a plan to race for money anyone who was keen up the local mad mile” ONCE upon a time there were two young men who were convinced that with enough balls and not much in the way of brains they could drink for free. So let me engage you in a tale of bikes, beers and big hairy blokes with patches. It was the late 1970s and my mate Justin and I used to frequent a particular hostelry in south-east London that specialised in heavy metal music and attracted all sorts of people, mostly dressed in denim cut-offs, this being the uniform of metalheads when I was a kid. Justin and I went to the local tech college together and rode a pair of Japanese two-strokes. Our life…

“UNLIKE THE EARLY GIRLS, THE CLUTCH IS LIGHT AND THE GEAR SHIFT ALMOST MODERN, ENCOURAGING THE RIDER TO FIND THE MOTOR’S SWEET SPOT” HARLEY-Davidson’s Roadster first appeared as the XLS 1000 in 1979. It was a four-speed Ironhead Sportster fitted with two-inch extended forks, a bigger fuel tank and a comfy dual seat. It’s been in and out of the line-up in the years since but has returned in fine form in 2016 as the XL 1200CX. It closely follows the theme of the original and is all the better for it, for exactly the same reasons. The differences to the popular 1200 Sportster Forty-Eight are significant, including 43mm upside-down forks, dual front discs, ’normal’ 19/18-inch wheel combo and gas-charged rear shocks. The Roadster sits much taller — seat height…

“MADNESS IS AN INHERENT PART OF MANY OF OUR PROJECTS. WHO ELSE WOULD RIP APART A PERFECT BRAND-NEW MOTORCYCLE?” SOMETIMES it’s not all about cubic inches, and less really is more. Here’s a case in point. RSD’s Indian Track Chief we featured back in issue #19 blew us away with what Roland Sands could do with the gargantuan 1800cc Indian Chieftain. This time he’s performed equally radical surgery on the much leaner 1100cc Indian Scout, and lifted his game to a whole new level. In both cases, Roland reached back into Indian’s rich pre-WWII racing heritage for his inspiration, and how apt that the more compact Scout, always the sports/race model in the line-up, should come out on top. Common to both builds was a completely new tubular cradle chassis.…

“YOU CAN’T GET PARTS FOR THESE ENGINES ANY MORE SO WE RAMPED IT UP SLOWLY” CHRIS Fraser is an interesting bloke. A three-times Australian Longtrack Speedway Sidecar Champion, he was also the long-time publican at the famous Silverton Hotel near Broken Hill. I met him in 2003 when he was racing a replica of Kenny Roberts’ XS750 flat tracker at Speed Week on Lake Gairdner in South Australia, and then again in 2006 when he raced another bike he’d built, this time powered by a supercharged Leyland P76 V8. His son Cec is a chip of the old block; they even share the same nickname, Frase. Growing up in the outback, Cec was riding a Pee Wee 50 at four and had his first run on the salt at 17.…

WHEN it comes to pure Art Deco style, Zündapp’s K-series bikes from the 1930s were as cool as they came. Introduced in 1933 as both horizontally-opposed, sidevalve twins and fours, they bore little resemblence to the small-capacity two-strokes that the factory had been building since 1922. The flat-four K800 was the flagship to put rival BMW’s twins in their place, and 80 years later still commands respect … if you can find one. The K stood for Kardanantrieb or shaft-drive, but the 600cc and 800cc fours had otherwise different architecture to the smaller twins and were as quirky in their engineering as their appearance. Remaining examples of what was a low-volume high-priced solo model in civilian guise are few and far between these days, especially outside Germany, but this impeccably…

“The little Suzuki stuck to my tail like he was at the end of a rope” YOU HAVE all heard about Murphy’s Law, which says “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. That, apparently, has been sourced back to a US Air Force engineer named Murphy. Well, there’s a corollary to Murphy’s Law called “the buttered toast phenomenon” which is weirder and goes like this: “The chance of the buttered side of the toast falling face down on the carpet is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.” To translate this into plain English, I think it means that if things are going to go wrong, they’ll probably do so either at the exact worst time, or they will cause maximum expense. Here’s an example … There we…

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THE workshop experienced the circle of life recently and things got a bit tough. Seddo lost a close friend in a motorcycle accident, my hero father passed on at 97 and my best riding mate JB lost his special nan, the woman who had raised him, with 99 years on the clock. I needed a circuit breaker when the lads phoned to say they were going for a run down the NSW south coast for a well-earned break. As so often happens to me, the timing was perfect. The trip was to be done the old fashioned way; get on the bikes, stop where we want to, and just make sure we get home five days later. I’d also recently purchased an eight-year-old 600 Yamaha so it would be a…