Harley Build - Cafe Racer Teardown Review

Hello, I'm Dennis for Fix My Hog and I'm with Tommy Clutch Creal. Where's my bike? I thought you said we bought a motorcycle. Days ago it was here. It was, there was something and it's been a good two days slowly taking it apart, really going through the design that we want to do.

The cafe racer. Sure. Working within a budget was super important. Having a plan, super important. Listing everything out, super important.

We went step by step taking pretty much the majority of the motorcycle part, as you can see, but when you view this in its entirety, you'll be able to see what parts you want to do for a build and to stay within a budget and to stay within your comfort level as well. So, here we are. I mean, that's the new canvas I guess, right? Absolutely. You got the tank over there and I'm going to try and put the seat on.

See if my Fix My Hog skills have paid off. Let's see. I think that's in there. That still fits that. So, not a true mock-up but it gives you a better idea of some sketches that we've done.

We've looked through the internet on the designs that we wanted to go through. The look we were going through. We talked about the parts along the way. Burley was nice enough to work with us through Revzilla also Revzilla sending us the drag specialties, Legendary Tank, I believe it's called. And I'm going to list all these this stuff out there will be PDFs.

There'll be PDFs of the budget. There'll be PDFs of the parts list, all this stuff, we're going over the plan. So, so this gives a better feel for, we cut the struts off. This is going to be open. Unfortunately or fortunately we had a chrome swing arm that we wanted to get powder-coated.

So we really had to take the whole swing arm off. So I have my list of some of the folks we're working with are here. New parts we talked about. You have a 20 year old motorcycle this far apart. You're doing extreme maintenance.

You're doing repair along the way. You're not just going to put some slap something back together. If a bearing's no good, or a bushing's no good, you're in here. You're gonna, you're gonna do it. Absolutely.

You talk about the wiring. This looks like it has some potential love it needs. Yeah, so it looks like a spaghetti mess at this point. Us clearing up and making it a simple, nice, sleek bike. It'd be nice to have all the wiring tucked away and under the backbone and making sure that we're double checking the connectors.

Obviously, as we went through this, we ran into a few things that we didn't see coming around the corner. So, as deep as we've gone, we could go a little bit deeper in some electrical and checking some of the pins and connectors back here, which we'll do. Like you said, it's critical now that you have a down this much of a backbone to take the extra step and just go through everything else. After 20 years, there's plenty of wear and tear on this thing. Exactly, we bought it used and we bought it for within a budget.

The previous owner was a fan of chrome and there was a lot on it. Most of it looks really good. I do like some of it, but it does cause this water holder. We took off, we showed you some of the pieces that water gets in between actually the cover on the oil tank before on the other side, not only was water getting in there, but when he changed the oil, sometimes any overfill of oil would, would leak down there. So those covers are unique.

The cylinder heads cause a little bit of damage. So if you're thinking of doing something like that on a project, think about the maintenance that's within that and the stuff that could go wrong, that can happen. The water get that gets captured in there. And then when water and stuff does get in there, it's hard to take things back off, right? Break off in pieces.

We had plenty of those that just snapped right off on us. Exactly. And you know, like you said as you were going through, we were checking to make sure everything's in good shape whatever isn't we're going to replace. So that's kind of goes... that doesn't kind of go with, that goes with the design that we're really working with.

We have some of the products here that we're going to be putting on the motorcycle. What do we got here? So we've got a S&S air cleaner right here, air filter. It's kind of that beefy muscle look on that right side. As we went through, obviously the powder coat and chrome and how to bring out one another and some of the parts and not be too over the top.

And that one has a chrome face car, right. So it'll really stand out. We'll talk about the color and we're going to do black but that chrome will really pop out. Yeah. For certain.

And because of having that chrome we have an override up here the black Super E S&S carburetor. So that's the black behind and having that chrome come out. And getting the performance out of it too, to a great carburetor. We're going to putting a little bit more of a free-flow exhaust on it. This 883 has been punched up to a 1200 already.

So there's the performance gain we're looking for with that. In regards to performance, I guess I'll switch over to our friends at Barnett. We're going to put a scorpion clutch in as we start to put things back together. So that'd be, that'd be great. What's?

What do we got? Decoded digital there? We've got a chrome front face on our new speedo here. So that'll help break up some of the black we're doing with bars and controls and bringing out some of the chrome components up on top. I'm not sure the color of the, can you change the led colors in there?

Or is it Amber and red or something? It's something pretty cool. Different. It's red. Yeah, on there.

That looks cool. So, it'll bring out a little bit more flare on the top and having a black tank as well. You get that, that pain factor. Then to go down a little bit, we're going to go with Burley. Yep.

We got the lower end kit for the front end. Also drop us down an inch. Cool. And what, you know, when you step out of normally what you do Fix My Hog, we've done hundreds of hours of maintenance videos, performance upgrades, we've torn a motorcycle down to replace the frame, but we kind of put all the components that were there back on. So to do a design like this is unique for Fix My Hog.

It's a great project. And when you're doing research for stuff like that and looking through sites like Revzilla, but then on Revzilla, who's TC brothers, that's really cool stuff. Kept on popping up for this type of design. They do a lot of scrambler stuff. They've done a lot of great builds themselves.

They make a lot of cool stuff. So we're going to do the mids with them. This had forwards. We're going to go with mids. Drop those back.

And then obviously with the rear fender gone can have the stock tail light sitting in there and airborne. And on an air hook, it does exist. We can make one, right? So it'd be not on the side of the swing arm there that nice little TC brothers brake light and all that fun jazz. I like that and Barnett, once again, more on the performance, not only looks, but we're going to go with, to break up the the black that we're going to do on the handle bars.

We're thinking some type of chrome levers. And then with this look will give us a little breakup and a little bling if you will, on the front but also very performance. That stock breakneck was not looking so good after 20 years. So this will be a great upgrade for that. And it's just a straight shot instead of going.

And then something happening to crossover right there under the trees. Cool. We have throttle cables. Remember those people, they go onto carburetors. So there's not fuel injected.

So that's a great upgrade for that as well. Great clutch cable. We're still keeping it classy too throughout this part. We are keeping it classy we are. And we still have decisions that are going to be made quickly.

We have rims that we're deciding on. We're thinking of used or Manhattans, or used and having them powder-coated to stay within a budget. What else do we have that we're still deciding on? It was a rear fender. We got that one knocked out.

Relocating the horn. I still see the mountain up here. That's going to be tossed up to the front. I think that's it. And then we have, and here's a great thing.

I am like many people awesome at taking things apart. But one thing I did learn over the years with Fix My Hog is if I label stuff and life gets in the way, it makes this type of project or any project alive easier. I step away for two weeks and it's, "where did this go?" Even though you have your manual, or a manual. If you took pictures, if you mark things correctly, you marked your electrical connectors correctly, all the breadcrumbs along the way to get you back together and then finding the space to lay everything out. We have our powder coat box.

Our boxes now are potentially resale stuff that's not going back on the motorcycle that does have some value. It had a decent exhaust on it that we could sell. The front and rear wheels weren't horrible. We can probably get some for those. So, to stay or help with your budget, you can sell some of the pieces.

Even if you just get a couple bucks it helps with that. Planning, Budget, planning, budget, planning, budget. Huge, huge, huge. Otherwise and I keep saying, I don't know if it's true or not. You end up with a piece of garage art that you just keep moving around because you're never able to fire it up.

It was never ready. And you have quite a bit of money invested in it already. So you don't want that. You want a schedule that you can follow. And hopefully this helps look at some of those things to go through.

And like I said, we'll put up the parts list that we did. We'll put up the budget that we came up with. We'll put up the stuff that either was worked with a partner with the cost of it. And that'll help you decide where do you want to go with your build? And, you know, $2,400 motorcycle, we're looking at rims and tires that were...

Way out of our... So almost as much as the motorcycle. Do you want to do that? You know, so you have to make that choice and it's easy to start going down that road. "Oh, I saw this on Instagram.

It looked really cool. How much? Oh, Hey babe, we're not going on that cruise." So you just gotta kinda stick to it, so you can move your project along. Oh, paint. Another key part.

Our vendor was nice enough to send us a couple of different black samples. You know, these are, what are these called? The wrinkles. Wrinkles. So Zach was saying, maybe we should do the the headlamp in wrinkle.

So that's a possibility. But then we have to decide as we get the final parts in, if there's anything that's gonna throw us off. And I don't think there is. You can see similar to what we have, that's going on in the motorcycle here. You know, we could slap this up against the frame and say, but not much in the frame is gonna be showing when we're done with this.

Right? Just the down tubes, pretty much. So, you know, do you go something towards that? I don't think I like too shiny. Maybe this or this would work too.

More of a matte or medium? Yeah. Decisions that we're going to make but it's good to get some samples and why powder coating? That's a good question. Yeah.

So obviously, having bikes painted nowadays. You're spending quite a few thousand dollars on paint jobs just because of the man hours and labor and paint cost itself. Not according to a much simpler process and it's durable it can handle the road much, much better. So I think to help stay with our budget and give us some flexibility with some other is we were able to get that down. You and I talked about it and I'm pretty sure we said we can do it.

So if we powder-coated this black and we wanted to do this something of this color to kind of make things work that's still doable in powder coating. It's not just, you get one thing. They've come a long way over the past... when I started 15 years ago. So we can definitely segment it.

I was looking at a sample book and there was even like chrome looking at powder coating. I wonder a couple of reviews that it was very durable. So I guess if you want to go nuts. Not put chrome covers on. You actually do put Chrome.

I guess that's it. I mean, here we are. We're gonna get the rest of the parts within our budget. We're going to double, triple check our stuff going to powder coating and we'll do a little bit of mock-up while it's down. But the majority of it will be, you'll be watching it as we put it all back together.

I think that's it for now. Well, thanks a lot. It was a good time. Thanks for the hospitality. We'll get your, your bike back here soon.

Yeah, what bike? I don't see a motorcycle. Oh, cool. Thanks everybody. Wrench safe and we'll see you soon.