Project Consideration : Cafe Racer

I met with an ex-banker friend from Kuantan at Rakuzen last weekend and he had never owned a bike. But he was going to get married in October and he wanted to live life dangerously before he joins Boringville for the rest of his life like the rest of us family men.

And he asked me about getting a bike.

I asked him about his preferences and he wanted a bike that looked big, didn't run too fast and was easy to maintain and upkeep. The last part would necessitate a Japanese bike.

He had a budget of about RM10k, so that should fetch him a used Kawasaki ZZR250, Yamaha Virago 535 or something in the region.

He was not too keen on the old-man-cruiser outlook so I thought that he could get a good platform and modify the bike into a Cafe Racer, which was all the rage overseas these days. That, and the naked streetfighter bikes are the trend these days.

Which had me thinking for myself too- I could get a Honda Shadow and modify it into a Cafe Racer. I started to look online for been-there-done-it examples and chanced upon this lovely modification from Dime City Cycles.

And you won't be faulted to say that it was really kind of hard to see the current resemblance to its initial Shadow looks, right?

From a stock platform like this...

To this mouth-watering example...