Green Monster
GREEN MONSTER
Believe it or not, Cobra super-sizes a Kawasaki Vulcan 2000
DAVID EDWARDS
CHOPPERS, AS IF YOU HADN’T NOTICED, ARE VERY ’OT CHIT THESE days, all the bleedin’ rage. Can’t hardly pick up a remote control without running into “Biker Build-Off’ this or “Southern Chopper” that on the ol' tube-de-boob. Jesse James has somehow become a blue-collar folk hero in a welding hat, selling customs that cost more than some people’s three-bedroom ranch-styles. Billy Lane and Indian Larry, with more tattoos between ’em than the crew of the USS Enterprise, are treated like royalty. Heavy-breathers by the hundreds line up just to get autographs from the Two Pauls of “American Chopper” fame.
Amazing.... By corn Denny Berg is a monk, toiling away in a nondescript einderb `al space no larger than a two-car garage, located where umbs to the California desert There are no Discos er"~ nters feeding him lines, no contrived,~for-the-camera `ty clientele dropping by-hell, not even a nimrod son
pikes br (~obra USA, purveyor 01 exhaust systems and e1ric cruisers, and now Harley-Davidsons He orks tried to yank a hulking Kawasaki Vulcan 2000 V is “Definitely a two-person operation,” says Berg, wincing at the memory.
The heavy lifting was required because Berg had plans for the mill. It would be the heart of “Mad Kaw,” an outrageous homage to the long bikes of the late 1960s and early ’70s, a time oftall sissybars and macho motors, extended fork legs and expanded consciousness.
“I’m a little tired of everybody touting ‘Old School’ stuff that really isn’t,” says Berg. “What 1 wanted was a prehistoric chopper with a few modern touches worked in.”
Kawasaki’s 125-cubic-inch pushrod Vec, while all-new, certainly had the classic trappings Berg was after, especially on the left side, with its four oil tubes running up the cylinders imparting a certain Wright Cyclone R1820 flair. Like that B-17 radial, it makes good power, too. Hooked up to Cycle World's Dynojet Model 150, a stock Vulcan 2000 pounds out 96 rear-wheel bhp and a stonking 121 foot-pounds of peak torque. To get anywhere near those numbers with a Twin Cam Harley, for instance, you’d have to shell out about $5000.
To accentuate the motor’s shapeliness, Berg got out the rubber gloves and chemical stripper, freeing the cases of their wrinkle-black paint. He then gutted the motor, removing the crank, gearsets, etc. before buttoning things back up so that nearby GQI Polishing could spiff the aluminum even then, a block-andtaekle arrangement was needed to hoist the motor so the buffing wheels could do their thing.
From the factory, Vulcan 2000s run fuel-injection, but the Cobra bike tosses that in favor of good old-fashioned mixers, dual Mikuni HSR48s. Channeling unfiltered air into the carbs is a pair of Magnum Engineering’s Virtual Velocity Stacks, basically inverted aluminum cones, borrowed from jet-ski tuning. That’s a custom-bent set of Cobra Speedsters, 2 i/2-inchers, snaking away from the cylinder spigots and aimed at the sky.
Sharp readers will remember that Vulcan 2000s are waterpumpers. So, where’s the radiator, that hard-to-designaround item that ruins the lines of many a modern custom?
Taking a cue from CW's spyshots of a hidden-radiator VTX1800 being tested by Honda’s R&D crew in Death Valley, Berg mounted Mad Kaw’s rad-actually a wafflefinned, double-loop heater core from a 1965 Ford Tbird-amidships, beneath tinware that suggests a traditional oil tank. A variablespeed fan pulls cooling air through side gills (barely visible in our lead spread), across the radiator’s vanes and out hidden holes swisscheesed into the rear fender.
“It’s really an airand water-cooled motor,” says Berg of the 2053cc V-Twin’s architecture. “Only the tops of the cylinders have water jackets. Kawasaki’s tech guys don’t think we’ll have any problems.”
A proper chopper needs a hardtail frame, so Berg ordered one up from Chopper Guys, although they probably won’t recognize the end result. Because the VN2000 is so immense, the engine bay-meant for a Milwaukee motor-needed alterations: 6 inches were added to the downtubes and the backbone got a 4-inch stretch. Unneeded tabs were removed, welds ground down, then the cage was paneled and molded, just like the old days. A Berg signature move, the wiring loom is hidden, neatly routed inside the frame tubes.
Sitting atop the frame is a one-off fuel tank done to Berg’s specs by Arizona’s Independent Gas Tank C ompany, a handsome piece that manages to be both slab-sided and artfully rounded at the same time.
Mow’d they do that?
Leading Mad Kaw down the boulevard is a springer fork of John Molmesian proportions. Genned up by Paugheo in less than a week when the original fork vendor couldn’t deliver, it's a 15-inch-over version of the old oval-tube HarleyDavidson setup. It is crowned by Joker Machine’s “Johnny 5” headlight, a tribute to both the robot in the movie Short Circuit and the rectangular lamps many choppers used to run back in the day. There’s even a tie-in to the stock Vulcan 2000 lighting and its triple-array of high beams.
Tank, frame and rear fender are cloaked in absolutely gob-smacking paint laid on by Zeak McPeak of Zeaks Design in Riverside, California. Weeks in the doing, it’s an almostimpossible-to-photograph candy lime green with gold metal flake and chicken-wire ghosting (an old hot-rodder’s trick that resembles snake scales), topped off with a pinstriping nod to the Great One, VonDutch. Depending on the light and angle of viewing, the paint goes from green-gold to an olive, the wire ghosting all but invisible at times.
As usual, Berg one-stop-shopped at Performance Machine for the rest of the running gear. Wheels are Vaders-21 -inch front, 18-inch rearinspired by old-school Invaders, a favorite of forward-thinking 1970s chopper builders. PM's inboard rotor locates the four-piston rear brake inside the belt-drive pulley, leaving the right side of the wheel clean and naked. Up front there’s a 10-inch disc with its two-piston caliper mounted at 6 o’clock, below the line of sight. Rubber is from Metzeler, the rear an impressively wide 240mm.
Actually, everything about this bike is outsized. Wheelbase spans some 83 inches-£///wo.s7 7 feet! The gas tank itself is close to 30 inches long. Walking up to Mad Kaw is almost like a sight gag, akin to approaching the Oueen Mary in that it looks massive from far away and just keeps getting bigger the closer you get. Berg’s traditional Knucklehead chopper, one of the original long bikes, looks about 3/4-scale by comparison.
Yet there’s a balance here, a correctness of proportion, that the cartoon-like TV “theme" chops just don't have.
“It has to do with geometric forms and mass-centralization; it’s got the right ‘math’ as far as a chopper goes,” explains Berg. “The Japanese have a word for it; ¡chiban, sort of an elevated ‘oneness,’ something that looks and feels right." (It’s also a good beer...)
Now, understand that from disemboweling the stock donor bike to rolling a completed Mad Kaw into the back of an 18-wheeler bound for its debut at the big Indianapolis Dealer Expo, build time was compressed into a very hectic 10 weeks. Mow busy was Mr. Berg? On the bike’s January 30 completion date, the man still had unopened Christmas presents sitting in his living room! Ask the standard interviewer’s question about which component is the builder’s favorite, and Berg answers immediately.
“The best part about this bike?" he says. “It’s done." □
