Greetings!
Welcome to the maiden post of the Old School Chopper Blog. Herein, a few of us will keep a record of the Sportster Project. My name is Doug and if you read any of my other blogs then you know I have a small mechanical shop in Outlook, a small, rural town in Central Washington, USA. I plan to build a simple, old school chopper using a Harley-Davidson Sportster, much like the one in the picture below and send it to Madrid Spain. My partner is a long-time family friend, Luis, a businessman who lives there with his beautiful family.
Luis spent a year in the US as a foreign exchange student in the '90s and lived with my wife's parents. He has a magnetic personality and we've kept our association alive through the subsequent decades. He now owns a sporting goods distributing company in Europe and Great Britain. He and his partner Ruben plan to market the completed chopper through their company and the project will be a joint venture with my company; Desert Classics LLC. The one below in the photo is an early Sportster, maybe from the sixties or seventies and is the model for our first effort together. If it works well and is profitable (or just not a loss, and really fun) then we'll consider doing Part Deux.
The fact is, I've found an engine on Craigslist and will be making the purchase this coming Saturday the 25th of January! The seller (a pleasant man named Mark) is apparently a real estate broker in Mesa and lives very close to my lovely, and newly engaged daughter Haley's law office. She is going to enlist her still-reeling fiance' and the two of them are picking up the used engine and storing it for me until I can get to Mesa Arizona to pick it up. Since I'll be attending my baby daughter's wedding in March, I plan to make the 1,000 trip by car so I can bring the engine home with me and get started.
It's a 1986 Sportster 1200 and it looks like it's been sitting for a while. No problem, it'll be coming apart at the seams once it's here in the Outlook Shop.
In the meantime, I'm gathering intelligence on this engine and choosing a frame for the project. It'll be a rigid frame like the one pictured above, and I'm very particular. I have a frame jig in the shop but I don't think its wise to scratch-build the first frame. I'd like to buy the first one and take careful measurements from it to make my own. I'm sure there are restrictions and government regulations in regard to registration and I may change my plans if I can't license the finished product.
If you notice the lines of the frame in the top picture, you can see a straight line coming from the neck to the rear axle plates. That is essential to the look of this bike. Then notice the bend in the bottom of the frame directly behind the transmission by the kick pedal. That is a critical component also. Other than those qualities, I want to try to match the "stretch" in the frame, which refers to the distance from the front of the engine to the fork neck. This open space is also important to give it the clean lines that make this one so appealing. I'm not interested in the extreme wide rear tires that are currently the rage, nor am I going to let any ridiculously tall "ape hanger" handlebars get too close to it either.
Departures from the example above include:
Welcome to the maiden post of the Old School Chopper Blog. Herein, a few of us will keep a record of the Sportster Project. My name is Doug and if you read any of my other blogs then you know I have a small mechanical shop in Outlook, a small, rural town in Central Washington, USA. I plan to build a simple, old school chopper using a Harley-Davidson Sportster, much like the one in the picture below and send it to Madrid Spain. My partner is a long-time family friend, Luis, a businessman who lives there with his beautiful family.
Luis spent a year in the US as a foreign exchange student in the '90s and lived with my wife's parents. He has a magnetic personality and we've kept our association alive through the subsequent decades. He now owns a sporting goods distributing company in Europe and Great Britain. He and his partner Ruben plan to market the completed chopper through their company and the project will be a joint venture with my company; Desert Classics LLC. The one below in the photo is an early Sportster, maybe from the sixties or seventies and is the model for our first effort together. If it works well and is profitable (or just not a loss, and really fun) then we'll consider doing Part Deux.
It's a 1986 Sportster 1200 and it looks like it's been sitting for a while. No problem, it'll be coming apart at the seams once it's here in the Outlook Shop.
If you notice the lines of the frame in the top picture, you can see a straight line coming from the neck to the rear axle plates. That is essential to the look of this bike. Then notice the bend in the bottom of the frame directly behind the transmission by the kick pedal. That is a critical component also. Other than those qualities, I want to try to match the "stretch" in the frame, which refers to the distance from the front of the engine to the fork neck. This open space is also important to give it the clean lines that make this one so appealing. I'm not interested in the extreme wide rear tires that are currently the rage, nor am I going to let any ridiculously tall "ape hanger" handlebars get too close to it either.
Departures from the example above include:
- Use of a front disc brake (duh), maybe two discs
- Use of a better rear drum or a rear disc instead of the mechanical brake on this one
- Electric start. The '86 engine has no kick pedal. I regret that, although it's embarassing to kick a beautiful motorcycle more than twice.
- I'll need to run a battery for the electric start and it won't have a magneto. I may use a full-size oil tank like the pictured one, but I'll mount it better.
- I'll probably use more color than just the black, but not wildly colorful. We'll see what my Euro partners think about the paint.
I'm excited to get started,
Doug
Hi, I would like to know about suspensions.
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