CUSTOM KAWASAKI
Turning a ratty Z650 into this stripped-to-the-bones café racer meant doing a full restoration on the engine first before the custom work could begin
Non-running Z650 modified into a café racer in a Foundry
FOUNDRY MOTORCYCLE in Chichester have a reputation for creating some of the coolest bikes on the so called neo-custom bike scene. They create unique and superclean streetrackers, scramblers, café racers or bobbers and are happy working on newworld retro bikes or customising old classics. This reworked 1977 Kawasaki Z650 B1 is typical of their work – a case of resurrecting an otherwise defunct classic that might have been destined for the breaker’s yard. Tom Simpson, the former blacksmith who owns Foundry Motorcycle, established his company with a simple ethos – not sticking rigidly to a formula to keep everything fresh. “I think my smithy background comes through,” he says. “It’s more organic rather than bolt-on. Most of the stuff on my bikes I make right here. I always make the exhausts flow in a particular way. I make all my own subframes. If I keep building the same over and over I could make more money, but each time I try to do something it’s different.” On the subject of this Kawasaki, he explains: “A regular customer of ours called Gary, who we’d previously built a T100 for, brought us this very neglected, non-running Kawasaki Z650 which he’d gone out and bought because he fancied having a go at building a café racer in his own shed. But fortunately for us, he’s far better at building houses than he is at building motorcycles. “But with a secondhand bike like this, it meant we had a lot of repair work to do before the build proper could get underway. Luckily, Gary had already arranged to have the scruffy, non-running engine fully rebuilt, so that was fully stripped and built from the ground up, taking it out to a 750cc lump along the way, with every single component being worked on. A second engine came with the bike, so we had something to build the rolling chassis around.” The customer’s original request was for Foundry to assemble a fairly basic bike as a ‘quick build’, but Tom soon convinced him to allow them to create something with a little more style that would make a truly unique one-off custom. “Gary’s a pretty patient guy, which is good because the simplest, cleanest-looking bikes always take the longest to get looking right and we always end up having ideas that result in a massive amount of work for us to do. “I think the end result is well worth it, though. We all love the way it’s turned out. It’s a great-looking bike with loads of neat details that you won’t spot at first glance.”