I love bikes that look over-engined, and I wanted to keep the frame and forks as narrow as possible. To keep the rear of the frame skinny, I put the chain sprocket on the outside of the frame.
The rear hub has female splines all the way through, and the shaft on the sprocket flange has male splines. The wheel bearings had to end up in the frame, of course. The frontend is inspired from old Speedway bikes, except for the pushing springs hidden inside the fork; it has drawing springs up by the triple trees and you can adjust the tension on two knurled nuts. The reinforcement on the fork is also something inspired from back then, but they used tiny solid round bars. Instead, I wanted it with profile tubes to get a nice line where the frame and frontend meet each other when looking at the bike from the side, but still looked skinny from the front.
To get the right dirt track/Speedway look I needed to have a magneto where the generator usually sits, so I made a chain drive inside the register cover to get the right gear ratio for the magneto. As it is a street bike, I needed a power supply for the lights, and with the generator in the trash can I had to figure out a way to get some electricity. My colleague Drusse always has a lot of weird ideas, so he came up with the idea of the alternator driven by the rear wheel-when you stop, the lights go out.
The wiring is solid copper core without any isolation that is wrapped around small knobs all the way to the lights. As with all Speedway bikes, it has a kill switch that you put around your wrist to shortcut the mag when you fall off (I don't know what you call this device; we call it "dead man's grip" in Sweden).
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Rear wheel-driven alternator: stop and the lights go out.
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I paid a lot of attention to the details on this bike-every part has a lot of thought behind it. All the bolts were rounded, grinded, and polished to give a feel of an old exclusive machine, kind of like a company would do on a concept motorcycle.I have run the bike only once, and I will run it to an upcoming show here in Sweden, but after that I won't start it until after the championship. It is really fun to ride, it turns fast, and is really light between your legs.
Since I have to work in the daytime to make a living, I built this bike after work and on the weekends. I have spent more than 889 hours in the shop, and the last three months I worked from 4 p.m. to 3 a.m. every night on weeknights and from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. on the weekends. Do I have to tell you that my wife is the best? The main reason why I built this bike is to compete in the World Championships and to promote my business. When the championship is over I will start using it if nobody gives me a good offer.
Just as we were about to wrap up this issue and send it off to the printer, one more email came in from Stellan informing us he had just come from a custom bike show in Sweden (the biggest bike show in northern Europe) where he won People's Choice, Classic Custom Class, and the Scandinavian Championship. Will this be the momentum he needs to reach the top of the custom bike world...?