Salt Shaker

SALT SHAKER

A top chopper goes land-speeding

MICHAEL LICHTER

USE HAMMERS, AN ENGLISH WHEEL, SHRINKERS, SHOT-bags, rollers, a psychic stretcher if you have to-what-ever it takes to bend your mind around this Roger Goldammer speedster.

Twice named AMD World Champion of Custom Bike Building, Roger toils away in rural British Columbia. His Goldammer Cycle Works will be happy to sell you a $5200 fork or a $500 air-cleaner (or a cool “Scary Rider” T-shirt), just don’t ask about a complete bike-those he keeps for himself.

Prime example: This unlikely land-speeder, built to compete in a made-for-television shootout at Bonneville.

“Pushing myself out of the comfort zone, experimenting with new ideas is a lot of fun for me; it’s what keeps me excited about bike building,” says the 38-year-old, whose last build-up was a blown single-cylinder neo board-tracker (see “Supercharged Single,” CW, January, 2005).

Project ExperiMental started life as the winningest dirtbike in the history of motocross, the Honda CR250R, this one a 2006 model. Goldammer then took his Sawzall and split the frame down either side of the steering head. This made room for a BRC250FE motor, the absolute antithesis of the usual big-Vee custom powerplant. This is a reproduction of the late-Eighties two-stroke tandem-Twin originally designed by Rotax and used in Aprilia’s GP bikeimagine half of a square-Four. Canadian company BRC unveiled the twin-crank, rotary-induction motor in 2002; it saw immediate success in super-karting. The $17,000 piece of precious metal is said to produce in excess of 90 hp at 13,200 rpm.

Engine placement set,

Goldammer then re-angled the steering head from 26.5 to 36 degrees and welded the whole plot back together. The swingarm pivot was also repositioned. Those two changes increased wheelbase to 65 inches from its original 58, making the chassis more suit-

able for the flat-out task at hand.

Leo’s Cycle in Denver, Colorado, built the modernized girder front end, suspended by a custom Fox shock. ExperiMental rolls on Metzelers and BST Revolution carbon-fiber wheels; stops with a single Brembo front brake and a rear binder that features a ventilated carbon-aluminum composite rotor sourced from a snowmobilehey, he’s a Canuck. The rear caliper is actuated via a custom thumb lever.

One gets the idea that Goldammer did not suffer the intrusion of video cameras gladly during the construction process.

“I couldn’t get a hammer or a screwdriver without someone getting in the way,” he says. “I would walk in and out of the camera’s view; it added a new dimension of difficulty to my work. Producers want to get you all worked up to make it dramatic. The only bad thing that happened was we fried an ignition and couldn’t get the bike started. We had one overnighted from Calgary to my shop in Kelowna without a minute to spare, but we got it going.”

Goldammer got the name for his bike from the classification given to homebuilt aircraft. In experimental planes, the pilot doesn’t know how the craft will perform until it’s flown for the first time. Well, Goldammer flew across the Bonneville Salt Flats at a two-way average speed of 128

mph, handily winning his “Biker Build-Off” challenge against Matt Hotch’s pretty but EFI-challenged Vinnie.

Bending our perceptions of what a custom bike is, that’s what Roger Goldammer does best. We can’t wait to see what he pounds out next.

-Mark Cernicky