ELAINE'S SPORTY

Elaine is Alex with the bagger’s other half, and this is her 2016 48 Sportster. As is often the way with serial custom freaks, he wasn’t too happy with the thought of his good lady riding a bike that was exactly the same as everyone else’s, and so set to it with her bike, customising it, and lowering it, to suit his better half.

The majority of it is as it left the MoCo factory five years ago (the wheels, forks, swingarm, and most of the bodywork too), with just a choice few dress-up parts including a new shortie rear ’guard to lose the gert big butt-ugly stocker, new mini apes to give a more comfortable riding position, whitewall tyres, a bling headlight divider that looks really good, Vance & Hines Grenade ’pipes (bloody loud even after Alex put baffles in ’em – he refuses point-blank to ride behind

her ’cos it makes his ears bleed!), a single leather saddlebag containing a fuel bottle for topping up the tank (something Elaine says is very necessary on a 48!), and a new corset-style seat made, like Alex’s, by Blazin’ Saddles that uses colours that really suit the paint scheme laid down by, you guessed it, Gus at Muddy Beach.

Actually there’s a bit of a story behind the paint. Elaine wanted Gus to use a pink with gold striping scheme for it inspired by the colours of a perfume bottle she liked, so he looked it up on t’Net, and painted what he saw, but he didn’t realise that the tartan pattern on/in it was actually the wallpaper behind the clear bottle. He says that it took him ages to do something that wasn’t actually there on her bottle but, thankfully, she loves it anyway!

NIK