We built a club-style bike a few years back (before all the cool kids created theirs) as proof of concept for our initial piggyback shock design. That bike has since been abused, jumped, desert ridden, and laid down. It’s looking pretty rough now and has been relegated to test mule for new products. The release of an updated 970 Series piggyback shock beckoned a reboot of our Dyna project, but the first bike was both spoken for and too beat up for the job. Luckily, along came Paul Smith who offered up his first-year Street Bob for an extended stay with the caveat it come back with something better in the way of suspension.

We mentioned it might get some other tweaks, and Paul was somewhere in Canada, so we took his silence as carte-blanche approval to go our own way.

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we took his silence as carte-blanche approval to go our own way.

Three bins of superfluous parts later we had the bike down to bare bones and a solid plan. The folks at RSD supplied a ton of the company’s new Clarity cover line, seat, and a pair of levers. The factory cast wheels did not look the part, and nothing billet seemed to fit our evil plan, so wire spokes would be the next part we’d need. Sam at Ride Wright Wheels understood our plight and cut us a deal on a set of his finest. We wrapped them in sticky Continental rubber and added PM brakes to complete the package. The sportbike-style rubber might wear faster, but we’d rather buy tires than fall down in corners.

Next came the bars and obligatory Ness fairing. We know the guys over at Burly Brand and got word they had a new club-style bar. They kept saying things like “first article” and “not in production yet,” but we’re pretty sure they were just playing hard to get, and they finally caved. A set of Küryakyn grips grace the ends, and we used a couple sets of its LED signals to keep things legal.

The crowning touch and true purpose of the bike was to highlight an updated piggyback shock. Not surprising to anyone, we love suspension travel; the more travel the better ride quality can be extracted from any given shock, and the club-style Dyna is the first build trend in a very long time that will tolerate a longer shock without generating truckloads of hate mail. Sitting at 13.5 inches (1 inch taller than stock), the 970 Series shocks are now sporting a black anodized finish, and each unit is hand built and dyno tested in our SoCal facility. An incredible amount of engineering and testing has gone into creating these shocks, and the ride quality is proof of time well spent.

Paint color was the one piece of the puzzle remaining, and black was on the list of potential colors. We wanted a clean, simple layout, but it still had to be unique. Imagine a room full of motorheads shouting out color schemes rudely interrupted by that screeching-needle-across-a-record sound effect as baby blue was brought up.

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Imagine a room full of motorheads shouting out color schemes rudely interrupted by that screeching-needle-across-a-record sound effect as baby blue was brought up.