Super Sportster

Super Sportster

CALIFORNIA SPECIALS

Harley-Davidson refuses to market a street-legal XR flat-tracker. Doesn't mean you can't roll your own.

JAY MOORE LOVES CUSTOM-BUI bikes—and he wants you to love them, too. “I’ve always wanted something different, something special, something nobody els has,” says the 47-year-old bank about his two-wheeled tastes. “New bikes are pretty, but when you cover the motor up, you take some beauty away. That’s why I don’t like most of today’s sportbikes.”

What Moore likes are street-trackers like his Sportster-based creation shown here. It copped Best Specials honors at the CW Readers’ Collection Show at Anaheim last year; now Moore has set up a company, Cycle Specialties (619/679-9540), to sell replica frame kits.

“Real XR-750 flat-trackers are the neatest-looking motorcycles in the world, but barely tolerable as streetbikes,” says Moore, who commissioned frame-maker C&J to convert its oil-carrying, twin-shock race frames to house fouror five-speed Evo Sporty motors (a conversion for old, iron-barrelled Sportsters is in the works, too). “The completed bike had to look minimal-kickstand, headlight and taillight only-everything else had to look like it came off a racebike,” he adds.

Operative words here are “look like.” Moore didn’t want a high-strung racetrack renegade. “You have to be able to hit the starter button and ride down to the 7-Eleven,” he says, “or idle through four or five days of stopand-go traffic at Daytona.”

To that end, the motor in Moore’s bike is anything but radical. A Wiseco big-bore kit bumps displacement to 1200cc. Sparks are supplied by a RevTech single-fire ignition. That’s it.

Much more toil went into getting the chassis and running gear right. For this, Richard Pollock, a 43-year-old Lockheed-Martin missile mechanic from Poway, a rural suburb of San Diego, was enlisted. It was Pollock, builder of a “jillion bikes, all kinds of strange stuff-nothing stock,” who mated the billet triple-clamps to an early-model Kawasaki ZX-7 front end. It was Pollock who genned up the spacers that allow the Barnes hub/Sun rim front wheel to fit the Kawi fork. It was Pollock who routed the $800 worth of steel-braided line around the bike. It was Pollock who adapted the Yamaha hand contols-“They’re clean, cheap and work well,” he says.

After a few months of back-andforth planning with Moore, it took Pollock just over three months to complete the project. The hardest part? “Lots of figuring,” says Pollock. “You try stuff, it looks like hell, you do it over.”

Which is where the Cycle Specialties kit comes in. For $3500, buyers get a C&J chrome-moly frame, swingarm, battery box, engine-mount hardware, triple-clamps and a “laundry list” of what’s needed to finish the projectincluding engineering drawings that can be taken to a machinist. Fuel tank and seat are available for $350 and $225, respectively; that swirling, stainless-steel exhaust for $475 (a similarly styled system for stock Sportsters will

be built soon, at the same price).

Says Pollock, “Building a bike like this is not an insurmountable task. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but we’ve done all the figuring.”

For those who want to do as little “figuring” as possible, a complete rolling chassis, “painted, powdercoated, polished and plated,” ready to accept the tuned Sportster motor of your choice, will also be available, priced at $11,000.

In building his own dreambike, Jay Moore had one last requirement. “Wherever I park it, the place has to empty out with people wanting to get a look at it,” he says.

With something as special as this Sportster street-tracker, that’s like money in the bank. -David Edwards