If Mad Max rode a Harley,...
If Mad Max rode a Harley, this would be his bike of choice.
I met the owner of this bike, Gordon Erickson, through Kirk Taylor at the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) event this past year in Las Vegas. Gordon was moving to Atlanta, and needed someone to keep an eye on his bikes from time to time. After seeing my Kawasabi bike I built at the local World of Wheels show, Gordon decided it was time to start a project in the ATL. We went through some options: Bobber, chopper, Buell custom...probably some others, too. Then the subject of how hot baggers have been recently came up, and Gordon's '01 Road King became the dominant topic of the conversation. Gordon had ridden the bike to Sturgis from Northern California a year or two ago. It ran great, but was lacking in the looks department.
The first two orders of business were to lighten up the front with a sport bike frontend and turn some Hemi valve covers into saddlebag tops. A Suzuki GSXR frontend and a pair of Keith Black Hemi Valve Covers were located at the local Internet auto supply house. We had to make spacers to get the Suzuki discs and rotors to work, and Neil Richardson made some new triple trees out of a couple of chunks of aluminum. Keeping with the high performance theme we used Automotive Racing Products (ARP) fasteners throughout the bike in order to keep everything bulletproof. The bags were made from scratch out of .080-inch 3003 aluminum by hand. Then the Hemi valve covers we were using for the lids had to have about 1/4-inch shaved off for proportion. Stainless steel hinges were fabbed for the lids, and the extra magnesium ended up as the bottom outside. I rough-shaped the bags, while Ben Boyle made the surrounding parts including the custom bent Nerf bars.
We came up with the idea of using the Road King to create a lighter, faster, meaner, sportier, and more menacing version of the old original. There were already some really good components on the bike, so we decided to keep most of its running gear in place. There was already a 200mm Metzeler mounted on a 18x8.5-inch rear wheel, a 2-inch lowering kit in the rear, and the Black Bike wheels looked good with the twisted spokes and black as oil rims. The engine was also already hopped up, as it had been stroked out to 106ci with S&S components. All good pieces, so why not turn them into a pie?
Putting the GSXR frontend on required making new fender mounts. I took 16-gauge sheet steel and hand-formed those up. They are pretty tricky little guys if you look at the shape carefully; there's not a lot of extra room around the fork where it comes down to the bottom. I also made custom headlight mounts out of stainless steel to mount a Ducati light.
Gordon really wanted to strip the bike of unwanted parts and weight. The front fairing and stereo he had on the bike were removed, crash bar with lights went away, girly pegs vanished, gauges disappeared, and so on. If it wasn't necessary for riding or carrying some stuff, it went away. We estimate we dropped about 150 pounds off the 700-plus platform.
The stock frame neck from Harley is a pretty ugly unit. It actually had a plastic cover...not good. We considered cutting it out, and doing a completely new neck area all together. However, a compromise was made to put lightning holes in the neck instead to visually help the area. We were very pleased with the outcome...much easier than jigging the thing up and making a new one, too!
I thought the bars were kind of unique. Normal Harley bars are mounted onto the triple tree. We mounted ours clip-on style like race bikes usually do. It was just another of the many mixes of race and cruiser techniques we used on the Road Warrior (the name we came up with for this bike). The steering dampner is from a Ducati, as well.