Panhead Bobber Rebuild
Kevin BaasDescription
Kevin brings his years of experience with these classic Harley-Davidsons and shows us how to match parts to make sure they work together. In the end, you want a Panhead Bobber that is rideable, safe, unique and a stand out from the crowd. Some unique elements of this Panhead Bobber build are the springer front end, unique to 1948 Panheads, a 1957 Panhead rigid frame, a British fuel tank, magnesium spoke style wheels, and a lot more custom and cool parts.
Follow along with this Panhead Bobber build and make sure to watch Kevin’s video on Knucklehead Builds and Panhead Service right here on Fix My Hog.
Hi, I'm Kevin Baas from Baas Metal Craft Vintage Bike Addiction, here with Fix My Hog. You may have seen some of the videos we did on Panhead service, Knucklehead builds from ground up. Today we're gonna kind of change gears and do a little Bobber build with a Panhead motor. Now what we have behind me here, this is a bike I built almost 15 years ago. And, you know, not all of you are gonna have the stock perfectly, every nut and bolt correct, you know restored Panhead.
Some people are building them from scratch. And that's what I did with this one. I scrounged parts, I went to swap meets, I traveled the country. Just finding little bits and pieces to make a bike that was cool to me. And that's what's great about these kinds of bikes.
You build a bike for yourself, and you build it how you think is cool, and as long as you're happy with it, it's awesome. And I'll tell you what, this bike it's a mud of all kinds of years and parts and genres, but it came together as something really special to me. This bike was actually featured in Dice Magazine back in 2007, and this is a nationally known magazine overseas. And I was able to, I unfortunately had to sell the bike to better my family, but I was able to buy the bike back just this last fall here, and now I got it back in here in the shop, and I'm going to rebuild it, change a few things up. I did have the motor pulled out and rebuilt, so this is a fresh rebuild pan motor going back in it.
So I'm going to talk to you about how to take a bike of just mismatched parts, What's gonna work, what's not gonna work. How do you make them function together properly? How to make it safe and reliable. But how to make something cool, unique that you can really be excited to ride down the road and take to shows and have people stand around and look at it and ask questions. So what you got here, you can see that I have Springer front end on it.
So from some of the other videos, you may remember that Springer front ends are specific to only a 48 Panhead, otherwise the Knuckles. This is a 57 straight leg rigid frame, so it's the last year of the straight leg rigid before they went to a swing arm style frame. Little Wassell British gas tank. There's going to be a nice sight gauge on here. And then we got some magnesium, 12 spoke style wheels on it.
15 rear with a car tire, 21 front. All kinds of cool stuff to make this bike really stand out, and not be like everybody else's. So stay tuned we're going to get this thing going, and we're going to build something cool.
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