Unholy Union
UNHOLY UNION
Ducati reality meets American ideas
THE WORDS, FOR MOST, are antithetical, contradictory. “Ducati” and “chopper” just shouldn’t be used in the same sentence, especially if you’re a Ducati lover. Unless such a sentence contains the phrase “smoked past.”
Mark Savory aims to change this. Savory isn’t some Harley V-Twin refugee looking for a new angle, but a sportbike guy who happened to have a 1995 Ducati 900SS CR apart in his garage and an amusing thought; “There were rumors a few years ago that Harley-Davidson might be buying Ducati, and it made me wonder what they would do in Bologna if they had to build a cruiser.”
That Savory is both a skilled computer illustrator and classic car restorer didn’t hurt his efforts. He first started tweaking on the vaunted Ducati image after a friend of his entered the Iron Butt Rally on a Monster, and she wondered what her bike would look like with a fairing. Savory hit Photoshop and moused out a bunch of illustrations, mixing and matching all kinds of frames and fairings. And for proof there is no privacy once something hits the Internet, after he e-mailed a link to the photos to his friend, the “private” web page got hits from all over, even from Bologna. Weird, he thought, that the Italians would be interested in such things. Which got him thinking even more, especially with those H-D rumors floating about.
So while Savory likes his computers, he likes his hammers and dollies and English wheel and lathes and mills even more, and subjected to them the aforementioned unloved (test-ride crashed by a potential buyer!) aircooled 900SS.
After a lot of chopping on the actual Ducati parts, he didn’t like the result and tossed most of it in the dumpster. Using skills he honed during restoration of various Pebble Beach Concours-winning 1950s Ferraris and old Bugattis, he fabbed up his own frame and pounded out bodywork 1 from steel to mimic the original Miguel Galluzzi Monster design.
“If you look at everything I’ve done in my career with cars, computers and bikes, it’s something I’ve come to call ‘visioneering,’” he says. “You envision something and engineer it so you can build it. I guess I’m too stupid to realize you don’t build Ducati choppers.”
He built the bike shown here with the basic ethos that, “If you have this European heritage, why bastardize it, why give it away?” Which is why he used absolutely no chrome and retained as much of the handling as he possibly could with a raked, hand-made trellis frame coupled to a 996 single-sided swingarm and inverted fork.
“It leans more than a standard Monster,” Savory says, noting that he tucked in the foot controls tighter than stock and worked hard to make the 35/8-inches of Penske-controlled rear travel work as best it could.
Once the finished bike went public, interest was so great he started MotoCreations (www. motocreations.com) at his Phoenix HQ.
He’s now working on a 996-based chopper for a customer, which should really upset Ducati lovers. Or thrill them. Maybe one day we’ll be talking about the Ducati chopper that smoked past us on a backroad...
Mark Hoyer
