Turning Junk Into Art | 1966 Harley Davidson XLCH

I originally started building the build about four or five years ago in kind of a bobber style. At the time, I was riding a Norton Commando café racer. I hadn’t seen a huge amount of Harley-based cafés, so I decided to switch gears and go for a café style. I had already modified the frame in a bobber style, so I had to cut it all up again and start from scratch. I left the engine cradle and swingarm pivot together and built everything up from there. I took all the frame dimensions off the Norton frame and laid them out on a piece of MDO plywood that I had marked out a 1-foot on center grid, that way I could get it real close geometry wise to the Norton’s dimensions. I spent a fairly significant amount of time getting the frame and motor mounts built and I had a few other bike builds going on. I kind of got burned out on which direction I was going so I shoved the bike in the corner for a year or so. Then one of my buddies who had a BSA 650 came over and asked me if I wanted to trade. I figured what the hell, so the deal was done. After about six months, my buddy came back and wanted to trade back so we did.

At this point I was pretty happy because with some time away from the project, I was now motivated to get working on the bike again. The time away had given me time to come up with some ideas. So I put the bike back on the table and started building the gas tank. My buddy, Young Pon, loaned me a fiberglass Manx-style tank that I used to get dimensions and patterns off of. I made the tank out of sheetmetal and I built a cubby inside the right side of the tank that the oil tank slides up into. I spent about 45 hours making the stainless steel motor mounts on the front and top of the engine, and I hollowed out the left side of the tank so people could peek in there and see them. Since I was going to be showing off the mounts, I spent about another 10 hours polishing them for a clean finish. I also wanted to make a cool stainless mount that holds the gas tank onto the frame. Stainless moves around so much when you put heat to it so getting the mount to attach in nine different places was a real bear! I had to TIG weld the mount in place making sure all nine mounts landed in the right spot. Then I had to take it off the bike so I could weld the hard-to-reach spots and still keep the mounting points from moving. The tank mounts took me about 80 hours to make.