HARDTAIL SUZUKI
– HOME-BUILT BUDGET BANDIT
Gary Wright, or Badger as he’s known, didn’t have to go to any number of suppliers, traipsing round from one t’other to find all the parts he’d need to build his chop (something that can be, and is, a fun, if time-consuming, way of doing it (and, in my experience, also a surefire way of getting enough caffeine to keep you from sleeping for at least a week). No, he used t’power of t’internet to collect everything he needed.
He bought a very tatty and, as it turned out, quite fooked part-built Bandit 600 chop a couple of years ago
– it ran okayish, and the frame, an unknown hardtail, was okay too, but just about everything else was a bit bolloxed. He pulled it all apart, replaced all the seals and bearings as needed, and rebuilt the brake calipers, and then, getting the bargain of the century, bought a second-hand springer front end for just £200 (!), modified it to suit the frame, and the fatter Bandit front wheel and its discs, and fitted it. He remade the loom so that the magic smoke no longer leaked out, and tried several headlight/tail-light combinations until he found the right ones – “There’s lots of crap on eBay,” he says, “not all of it is good!”
With the bike up, running and riding, one of the last things he had to do was decide on a paint scheme. Unable to make up his mind, pulled this way and that by bikes he saw, he sprayed it matt black temporarily and then, during a visit to the Bike Shed Show in London, he saw a Sportster that’d been done in the exact colour he wanted, and in a style he liked. Almost straightaway he set about creating the duck egg blue patina paint, using just rattle-cans and some Seventiesstyle decals (suitably adapted, of course).
That didn’t mean the bike was finished, though; no, he says the bike is, and always will be, a work in progress, with changes being made as and when. He’s since modified and fitted a set of Sportster forward controls, and fitted a mini-speedo (he’d bought a GPS one, but was the size of a small country), made the sissy-bar, and mounted an Austin Seven rear light into a Mini ball-joint holder on it. I doubt he’ll stop there, and it wouldn’t surprise me if, by the time the posh oiks in Westminster let us out again in a couple of months, it hasn’t changed again.
The ride, he says, is interesting with only yer spine as suspension, but it makes him smile every time he’s out on it… even if, as he so eloquently puts it, it does give you an arse liked a ripped-out fireplace.