Ride amazing New Zealand!
Superb all-inclusive guided tours, self guided tours
and latest model rentals. +64 9 473 9404We are NZs only BMW Motorrad
Certifi ed travel partner.http://www.paradisemotorcycletours.co.nz
NZ Government Tourist Board Quality AssuredW
C
NFrom a one day excursion tour to a two week exploration
Personalised tours. Small groups. Always fun.
[email protected]http://www.justridemotorbiketours.com
Creating memorable motorcycle rides for you in New ZealandCHECK OUT THE NEW
RETROBIKE
NEW-ISSUE RETROBIKE #17 IS ON SALE NOW IN
YOUR LOCAL NEWSAGENT — GRAB ONE!Retromod1984 SUZUKI 750 KATANA6 retrobike ISSUE #17 ISSUE #17 retrobike 7street fighter that he’s dubbed Street Kat from a bike that The bike was highlighted in Aussie flick 750 that appealed to the Melbourne bike parts distributor. started as a basket case. Owner David Anderson has realised his vision of a retro TThere was something about the 1984 Suzuki Katana GSX HIS Suzuki Katana is wonderfully minimal. rear and the cockpit view is free of clutter. is gone, the CBR600 F4 ducktail sharpens the The original pop-up headlight and bikini faring Shame and that’s
where he saw it and started imagining how it would fit in with his penchant for café racers and love of Suzuki’s stylish classic.saw this on eBay I thought, yes, this is the one,” he says. “Going to a basic street fighter was the idea. The original “I had an ’81 650GS Katana for 15 years and when I
ducktail was damaged and I saw some pictures of an 1100 from Germany that was similar – it had the CBR tail, but still with the Katana fairing. I wanted to clean the front right up.”description because it was hardly in a condition you would call an ideal starting point. “It was just 10 boxes of parts – it The bike he’d found was identifiable only by the owner’s
had been completely butchered. It was a rolling frame with an engine in it and that was how I got it.and done a terrible job. They sprayed the frame while the engine was still in it, so half the engine was covered in paint. It was an absolute mess.”“Someone had started working on it as a street fighter
for $800 and going straight to the professionals – Bikecraft in Mordialloc, Victoria.it was just a horrible job with bird shit welds everywhere,” says Bikecraft’s Brad Wiseman. “The instruction from Dave was to pretty much do what we did, but we had to start by That meant a quick, cheap sale with David picking it up “Another guy had started rebuilding the subframe but
getting rid of all the work that had been done before.”How to turn an $800 pile of junk into a work of road-riding artWORDS JUSTIN LAW DESIRE| PHOTOGRAPHY OWEN STUARTSTRNamedNdEET^ KATWANT to hide those pesky switchblocks? Do what Dave did and wire in a set of GripAce digital push-button controls. It’s a simple strip unit that fits into any grip or can be mounted on the handlebar next to it, with a single wire routed through the handlebars to the CPU.Holding the left grip, you can feel a row of four
small buttons under your fingertips. From right to left, the first button is for your right indicator, the next the horn, the third button is the left indicator and high and low beam is controlled with the last. Hold in the first two (horn and right indicator) to start the bike.“I wanted clean bars, and after a friend showed
me GripAce digital switches, I decided that this would be ideal,” Dave says. He couldn’t find a local distributor so now sells them himself through his Keband Custom Parts business.378 461. Visit http://www.gripace.com.au or phone Dave on 0419RetromodThe skill of the custom builder lies in achieving a cohesive whole from disparate parts, and then having it all work together on the street. 1984 SUZUKI 750 KATANA
If you didn't know better, you'd swear it was stock but it's anything but8 retrobike ISSUE #17 ISSUE #17 retrobike 9a Wiseco big-bore kit that Dave had imported from the US, taking the original 747cc out to 810. That was the only real modification to the powerplant, with most of the work going into the rolling stock and subframe.The engine was sent to Dynobike to install To transform the old Kat’s handling, it was
decided a 2002 GSX-R1000 K2 had all the necessary parts – it was a class leader at the time. The original 16-inch front and 17-inch rear wheels are now a pair of 17s, and the old rebound-only adjustable conventional forks (with their fabulously ineffective hydraulic anti-
dive system) have been replaced with the K2’s sexy upside-down fully adjustable items.Bikecraft makes its own billet triple trees (with a neat design flourish) to suit. The trouble was fitting the new rear end to the old square-tube cradle frame. The front end wasn’t such an issue because
replaced with the Gixxer Thou’s awesome fully-adjustable unit along with the substantial alloy swingarm it’s attached to. “I wanted a wider rear wheel and the only way to do that was to replace the swingarm,” Dave says. “To make it fit we also The first-generation single shock was
had to modify the front sprocket, which I had done in the US.”spacer to offset it for the wider rear wheel, was sourced from Rob Wilton (www.parts.suzuki-katana.com) who stocks a bunch of useful upgrade bits. However, fitting the swingarm was The 530 chain conversion sprocket, with a
more involved.swingarm and shock,” says Brad. “That was the tricky bit and took a bit of trial and error, but we got there.”“We had to modify the frame to mount the Once that was done, it was time to move
onto the sitting bit. “We fabricated the whole subframe – it was time consuming to get it all right,” Brad says. “Dave had the idea of using the Honda CBR600 F4i tail and we sat it on there and looked to see where we could go with it.to make it match up with the tank, so it isn’t “The tail piece had to be trimmed and welded
totally original, and we made the sections between the tailpiece and the tank as well.”and the front section re-covered in custom leather, while the F4i’s pillion pad under the cowl was re-covered in red to match the The old two-up Katana seat was cut in half
Suzuki lettering on the tank. “It kinda keeps that old Katana red and silver two-tone thing going,” Dave says.is neatly matched to the height of the iconic fuel tank. It was the first of the ‘hornet thorax’ look with the aggressive lines resembling a sword – With the Honda’s silver cowl on, the ducktail
hence the name Katana – and it set this model apart from the rest when it first appeared. Keeping that style was important and in this re-imagining has been enhanced with the sharper tail, which makes up for ditching the trademark fairing and pop-up headlight.
I got it,” says Dave. “The units on it now are Dominators from the UK.” Brad custom-made “The headlight wasn’t with the bike whenAt Your Fingertips64 retrobike ISSUE #17 ISSUE #17 retrobike 65POSTIE NATIONALSmotorcycle scores its own showAustralia’s most popular WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY GEOFF SEDDON forever is Matt Bonanno of Bathurst. “We used to race them around the paddock on methanol,” he says. “When we stopped racing, I had all these race bikes lying around, so I decided to build
some bikes to ride on the street. I’ve been doing it for about eight years now.”His black-and-white sheriff-themed custom is the hit of the Nats, along Matt is well-known in postie circles.
with his Coca-Cola special (which featured a manual clutch) and John Vella’s tasteful blue roadster for which Matt built the engine.Fabrications is another prolific postie customiser, displaying a trio of wild choppers and a called Postie Lee. He also had a hand in Ryan Martin from Moosefoot Dukes of Hazzard tribute
a few others and many bikes sport his 72-spoke wheels. Our favourite chop is his blue 60s-style chopper, although I have to admire the humour of Sexual Chocolate, named after the band in the
Eddie Murphy movie Ryan’s daily ride is an uber-cool military-looking slab-green bobber painted in Colorbond fence paint! Coming To America.LifestyleMcentrifugal clutches but also their economy, reliability and cheap prices.Australia Nationals in Maitland, NSW, who’s been into them One of many entrants in the inaugural Postie Bikes ANY motorcyclists in regional Australia learnt to ride on ex-Aussie Post Honda CT90s and 110s. They’ve been a hit with farmers for decades, not only for their hands-freeMAIN Chinese-made step-throughs, prices of Jap-built CT110s are soaring. TOP LEFT MIDDLE LEFTWith Australia Post recently switching to Easy riders! Craig Mainprize and George Vergotis
hold the cross-Australia postie bike record of five days, 13 hours. That is not a misprintBOTTOM LEFT bunch of groovy choppers Moosefoot Fabrications trucked in a
78 retrobike ISSUE #17FIGHTING WORDS CB900 BOLDORIof my twisted psyche.10 years ago I was already missing the thrill of two-wheeled shenanigans. So a suitable THOUGHT for a change I’d take a break from deriding motorcycles of less than adequate substance and regale you with tales of derring-do from the vast annals When I arrived on this sun-kissed island
mount had to be procured; limited funds and a young family to provide for made the choices fairly simple. It had to be under a grand, running and relatively quick.As some of you may know, my leanings
are towards the street fibike. A quick riflresulted in a 1980 CB900F resplendent in rattle-can black. Perfect, thought I!The bike was mine for a mere 500 e through the Bay of Evil ghter style of
bucks and indeed it ran — for about a nanosecond till it burnt out its coils and some other electrical doo-dahs. Ah well, it’s not the end of the world.A good friend of mine was wrecking
bikes at the time, amongst other things, so a trip to his shed got me the running gear from a 1990 GSX600. I grafted the front forks, instruments and wheels on to the geriatric Honda. Already it was beginning
to look much better, lower down and a lot less spindly.Ohlins shocks that needed rebuildingbeefed up the suspenders on the arse ofNext up, a free pair of XJR1300 pretend
the bike. The obligatory twin headlightswent on with no grief and an LED stop-tail strip took care of the rear lighting requirements after I made up a plastic insert to fipiece to mount it on. ll in the rear of the Honda’s tail
and see if it handled any better. I used the ‘I’m going to visit the mother-in-law’ excuse to travel 150km to Sydney — yeah, I know I wouldn’t believe that either — So the time came to test ride the thing
and off I went.
escaped over the previous 25 years but she still pulled respectively well. The main change though, was that she turned in a lot quicker with the 17-inch wheels Some of the old girl’s ponies had
and the more modern forks and shocks, which made cornering a joy! I have ridden stock versions of these beasts when they were new and on the limit they were a bit scary. The original FVQ (fade very quickly)
shocks were in my humble opinion shite, as were the composite Comstar wheels.foray onto Aussie roads until the local gendarmes decided I was having far too much fun and needed to put a stop to such frivolity. Apparently in Australia, lane So there I was, enjoying my fi rst
fi ltering is frowned upon — I was a London courier for years so it’s in my DNA — as is fiand twos on. To my mind the safest place to be on a bike in traffi ling in behind a cop car with his blues c is either in front of
the pack or behind an emergency vehicle. It was an opinion the young offistopped me disagreed with.on the cop’s hip — we don’t arm our cops The fi rst thing I noticed was the Glock cer who
in the UK, so I couldn’t take my eyes offThis made him a bit nervous, which made me even more nervous. Add this to the look on his face when he asked me what the little symbols on my UK licence meant it.
and I replied with my natural cockney sarcasm, “This is a little car and that is a little bike...” four points and ticket in Australia before It didn’t go well, resulting in my fi rst
I even got an Aussie licence! But I gained a smile when some dude came up to me after all this and asked what the hell bike I was riding. I had succeeded in turning the Honda into a reputable street fi ghter all
for less than three grand. It can be done, go do it!doing it. Until next time, stay safe but have fun“The safest place to be in traffic is eitherin front of the
pack or behind an emergency vehicle”OVER YONDER ON A HONDAWA LKE RWITH JIMMI WALKERRCB017 p078 Walker.indd 78 11/21/2014 3:08:25 PM079_ARR112.indd 1079_ARR112.indd 1 5/02/2015 12:04:33 PM5/02/2015 12:04:33 PM