Custom builder creates money-no-object carbon Continental
Customiser Ant Partridge turns his attention to Enfield’s Continental GT650
‘I decided to remove all the stock parts’ ANT PARTRIDGE
What do you get when you cross a money-no-object carbon race bike, with a budget café racer? This custom Royal Enfield Continental GT650, clearly. Built by Ant Partridge for his TV show Goblin Works Garage, the machine was built to be “a thoroughbred racer”. The first thing Partridge did was strip the bike back to the frame. Partridge always had the idea of building a bodykit but wanted it to work on stock twin-shock GTs as well as the custom monoshock bike he was planning. So he sent the bike over to Ziggymoto, who scanned the frame to get it into 3D software, from there a bodykit was designed and some foam bucks were built that would act as the reference. A reverse image mould was created from the bucks, meaning that exact replica fibreglass bodywork can be produced over and over. Next up came the low-fat rebuild.
“In the interest of stripping as much weight as possible and adding a heap of performance, I decided to remove all the stock parts bar the frame, motor and electronics,” says Partridge. “The obvious choices were the best Öhlins has to offer: their FGR300 forks and TTX GP pro rear shock. BST provided the superlight full Carbon Rapid Tek race wheels and
Dunlop EU wrapped the rims in the sticky Sportmax GPA pro soft compound tyres.” Braking has been improved with Galfer floating discs, and Brembo calipers operating from Magura levers. To convert the bike to a monoshock and make room for the fat rear tyre, Partridge had a new swingarm made by ex-Spondon Engineer Gavin from GIA Engineering. That wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds as even with all the work required for the conversion, the frame still had to be notched by 20mm to take the driveline for the wider rear wheel. Of course all this performance kit wouldn’t make sense without a performance boost, so Partridge fitted an S&S 750cc big-bore kit and Power Commander, which delivers a near 25% boost in output.
So how does it handle? Well the weather and the pandemic haven’t been kind to testing, so all Partridge has managed is a brief shakedown but initial impressions were a huge boost in the fun factor. You can watch the whole of series two of Goblin Works Garage on dplay.com right now.