Twin Cam Custom
Twin Cam Custom
Now meets Then with a Big Twin board-tracker
DAVID EDWARDS
THEY WERE THE ESSENTIAL AMERICAN MOTORCYCLE, flame-throwing, oil-spewing buckboards that careened around saucer-shaped speedways made of wood. "Neck-and-Neck with Death!!!" screamed the posters, and when the board-trackers came to your town, everybody turned out to see the spectacle. Glory or gore, something was bound to happen.
Nine decades later, looking to make a big splash with their new line of Harley-Davidson exhausts pipes, the folks at Cobra were stumped. A PR vehicle, a rolling billboard, was needed, but what to build? The whole slammed, stretched tank, fat-rear-tire thing had been done to death. A billet bloated barge didn't make the right statement, either.
"We needed something trick, something different," says Denny Berg, head of Cobra's Special Projects Division, a small skunkworks design team. "It needed to be spindly... like a vintage board-tracker."
Concept arrived at, artist Mike Rinaldi began making sketches. Meanwhile, catalogs were consulted, phone calls were made. From Harley-Davidson came a crate-motor Twin Cam 88, gearbox and Dyna Glide swingarm. Performance Machine provided the wheels-2 1-inch "Vintage" models front and rear-and the brake components.
It was then time for Berg to get to work.
With motor, transmission and swingarm locked together and supported on jackstands, he began cutting, bending and welding the steel tubing that would make up the frame. A single downtube splits beneath the engine to form a cradle for the 1-inch torsion bar that provides springing for the rear suspension. Made by KT, the "Softspension" system runs a pair of small, springless dampers, mounted here at the rear of the seat/tank bodywork. Berg ties shocks, link and torsion bar together via triangulated swingarm bracing that hints at a rigid rear end-except there's 41/2 inches of travel available. The old board-track aces never had it so good.
Zoom-in on the pewter-painted frame and be amazed at the symmetry and smoothness of the joints. "That's all metal," says Berg with more pride than usual. "Other than a wipe here and there, there's not an ounce of bondo."
A typical Berg fine detail? The swingarm's nickeled axle plates, held in place with four tiny screws, so the paint doesn't wrinkle when the rear wheel gets adjusted.
Signature component is, of course, the bodywork, inspired by the torpedo tanks and bicycle saddles of the old motor drome racers. Working from Rinaldi's fmal artwork, Berg draped a laminated chunk of modeling foam over the frame's backbone, got out his turkey-carv er and disc sander, and proceeded "to make dust, lots of it." The first iteration was "kinda guppyish" and had to be modified before being sent off to be replicated in carbon-fiber. Though it looks cav ernous, the tank holds just 2 gal ions, its underside hogged out so it snuggles up to the cylinder heads, carb, coils and twin shocks. A right-side snipe delivers air to the unfiltered 45mm Mikuni.
In all, the sub-project con sumed two full weeks of Berg's build-time. "It was," he says, "a lesson in patience."
The finished piece, painted and pinstriped by Damon's, wears a molded-in LED taillight, a Yaffe flush-mount, push-to-open gas cap and a one-off seat pad, its leather cover hiding a pair of gel inserts. "For a thin seat, it's pretty tush-friendly," attests Berg.
Everywhere your eye falls on the Cobra "Trakker," there's something worth investigating. The fork is from a late-model Sportster, tubes shortened, stan chions shaved. There's all of 2 inches of travel-careful not to use it all in one place. The tiny front rotor is a PM roadrace rear, drilled, nickel-plated and gripped by twin calipers in a "push-me pull-you" anangement of Berg's own devisement. The nylon brake line runs cleanly through a tunnel carved into the mounting plate-the man gets real Type A when it comes to routing hydraulics, control cables and electrical wires. Rear brake is neat inboard arrangement sold by PM. You may have noticed there's no rear brake pedal. Berg linked both brakes through the handlebar master cylinder. "Just keeping it simple," he says.
Respect is given to the glory days in various ways. Berg's diamond-shaped decoration on the Primo belt-primary end plate harks back to the tin covers seen on JD Harleys. If the rearset shift link age looks familiar, that's because parts of it first saw duty on a 1950s Duo-Glide. Likewise, the rub ber footpegs come from an Eisenhower-era Hog. An abbreviated version of the Teens/'20s seat-post stor age boxes hides the electrics and a laid-down gel cell battery. "We've paid homage to the old stuff, but brought it into the future," says Berg.
Not a bad summation of the bike itself.
"There will never be another motorcycle like this," says Berg. "It's all hand-made, all in my little 1000-square-foot shop. I think I'm proudest of the frame-it started out as just a bunch of straight tubes over in the corner."
Then, stepping back into character, Berg downplays the six-month flog needed to get the bike ready for its debut at the big Indianapolis Dealer Expo.
"Once we had the concept, the bike built itself," he says. "I just held onto the wrenches."
Don't you believe that for a second.
