Franzgarage BMW

I received an email from Francesco Pagnin from Italy with photo's of his first build. It's this stunning BMW caferacer, very, very nice bike. Well done Francesco!!!

Kawa update

Spend some time on Zoran's Kawa again this weekend. I'd already made the rear spoiler for it and a bracket for the rear light. Wanted the latter to be different from usual, but I'm not happy with the result, it looks a bit like a lampoon now, so I'll probably change it. This weekend I made a side mount for the license plate. Wanted a light (looking) construction so I made it out of steel bars.

Season 2K11

I'm not the only one to have had my first ride of the year. Excellent editing!

Season 2K11 from Brauchi on Vimeo.

On http://brauchisbikes.blogspot.com/, check it out, it's a nice blog (In German). Thanks to Lars!

Peace of mind

Small bikes, big fun?

While building the Suzuki I cam into contact with Ineke. She lives in the east of the Netherlands and is building not one, but two GN's and I think the end result is fantastic! Looks like a hell of a lot of fun to ride!

Great job Ineke!

Hell yeah!

My apologies for the crappy quality of the video.

We finally did it! Last night we changed the spark plugs, put a filter on the freshly cleaned carb, screwed in a couple of bigger jets and she fired straight up on both cylinders. After some minor fine tuning we decided to take it to the road. It goes like stink!

We've been fighting this carb for a while now and some people started to lose faith, but we won. We still have to do a little fine tuning (it's still a bit lean in the bottom ranges), but we've now proven it can be done.

Wanted: Models

And I don't mean the female kind, though I won't say no to that!!

When you go trough the pages of this blog You'll see that besides motorcycles photography is also a bit of a hobby of mine. The perfect combination is obviously taking photo's of bikes, easy. Only: I've been photographing the same couple of bikes for a long time now and it won't hurt to photograph a few others, so:

If you want some pictures of your bike: mail me.

I'm convinced that kapitalisme has already destroyed too much, so I'll do it for fee. Gratis. Gratuit. Voor nop. But since I'll be doing it for free I have a few demands, those are:

- The bike must be special. Either nicely restored, nicely customized or in an excellent condition. - It also had to happen in or around the City of Utrecht, the Netherlands. Else it'll take me too much time and the traveling will be too expensive for me.

So that's it. Mail me if interested!

Yesterday

Was a fine day. The rest of the week will just bring lots and lots of rain...

A sunny Sunday

Nice and sunny day today! Bit cold, but finally clean and dry roads. I took the CB for a 3 hour blast trough the Dutch countryside. I had way too much fun to stop for photo's.

When I got back my girlfriend wanted a go with the CB. She had not ridden the bike before, so I was curious to see if the bike wouldn't be too big or heavy for her. But all was fine, she loved it and she felt comfortable with the bike within a few meters.

I made some photo's, but the sun was already gone.

We've also worked on the Virago again this week. We've really been fighting the carb lately and this week was no exception. The bike gave a nice fire works display while trying to tune the carb:

First part of the video is from the side, second part is looking into the exhausts form the rear. I took the carb home with me to clean it thoroughly, which I've just done. We also need to find more (bigger) jets to play with to find the right set up. It's demanding quite a bit of our patience, but we'll get it to work.

BikeExif

Woke up this morning to see my CB on BikeExif. Chris, the editor of BikeExif, had mailed me a short while ago with a link to Zegraignos and a few questions about the CB so I kind of knew it was coming. For the people coming to this blog via BikeExif a short introduction about me and my projects. On this site you'll also be able to see the whole build of the CB and the current XV920 project.

My bike building addiction started with this bike:



It's a Honda CX500 I bought together with a friend. We turned it into this:




It turned out so much better than expected!



The next project came when my girlfriend wanted a bike for herself (I was still riding my first bike at the time, a Yamaha YZF750). We found a CX500 in mint condition (only about 18.000 miles on it!) in parts in a shed somewhere. I turned it into a mild cafe so I could easily return it to it's original state (my girlfriend insisted on that):
as bought:

As it is now:

All this could only lead to one thing: Me selling my Yamaha to build a bike for myself. I decided to go for a wrecked BMW R80. It was a wreck, but it was cheap, had upgraded suspension and a 1000 cc engine.



I turned it into this.

In the mean time I'd also bought a Yamaha XV920 Virago together with the same Guy I build the CX500 Chopper with.


It's not finished yet, but we're getting close to the first test ride...






It didn't end there.... I'm an addict, so I had to build something after finishing the CX500 and the BMW. The Virago is a bike we build with the two of us and we can't work on it as often as we'd want to, so I bought another project for myself. A Suzuki SP370.

Another ULTRA low budget project. When it was finished I liked it, but didn't love it. Mainly because a 400cc Thumbert is just not big enough for me 6'7 frame.




So I sold it and bought a Honda CB750, the bike you can see me building on the last couple of pages of this blog.

As you can see I really got addicted to low budget bike building/customizing. Before I started my study I worked and had money to buy a Yamaha YZF750. It was a fabulous bike, but when we bought the CX500 for my girlfriend two things became obvious: 1, A relatively new supersport and a old bike don't mix. There was no way the cx could keep up with the YZF, even while riding slow on the YZFG. So if we wanted to ride together, something had to change. And 2: Old bikes are way more fun.

Besides from being cheaper old bikes live more. You can feel the vibration when accelerating, you can feel the frame flex a little when you throw it in the corner, it can be a moody starter on cold, wet mornings, it can be kicked to life in one kick when warm. It has a soul.

Nothing beats racing one of these old bikes you've build up yourself over a twisty road on a quiet Sunday morning, no matter what the add of the new R1/GSXR/ZX-R is trying to promise you.