Suzuki Gsx-R1000 Bob-Job

SUZUKI GSX-R1000 BOB-JOB

One man’s humble attempt to make a cool Suzuki kool

PETER JONES

HAVING TO NAME MY CHOICE FOR COOLEST MOTORCYCLE OF all time has caused me to lament the machines I’ve desired but never possessed. Sure, I've had some cool bikes, but I've never owned one of the masterpieces of motorcycling. When possible, though, I have faked it by dating the “witless sister."

I once owned a Ducati 860 GT while obsessing over anything Ducati with a desmo drive. I had a Yamaha RD350 while wishing for an RD400. I had a Laverda 3C while my heart longed for a

I didn’t want to name as the coolest bike another unfulfilled desire, so the timing of this assignment was perfect. I finally do own a motorcycle that I can proudly call the coolest bike of all time. Coolest in how it performs, in how it looks and, most of all, in how it embodies the history of my personal motorhead lusts.

The coolest bike is my 2006 Suzuki GSX-R1000 Bob-Job. The concept was to create a bob-job out of a modern sportbike, making it old-school yet high-tech. Plus, I wanted the bike to reflect my inspirations, going back to my childhood days of Rat Fink, Moon Eyes, AMT 3-In-l model kits and Stingray bicycles.

In the 1940s and ’50s when bob-jobs were first mothered, the necessity inspiring their

invention was the search for cheap performance. Performance was gained not through respectable commerce but through the zealous removal of engineered items, then tossed into the ditch behind your daddy’s house.

For my bike’s hot-rodding homage, I needed a one-off rear wheel that would look like a stamped-steel car wheel. It would be paired with a wire wheel up front, like an early T-bucket dragster. Gregg’s Customs provided a single-sided swingarm, necessary to show off the “outside” of the wheel with its five lug nuts. Gregg built the rear wheel from scratch. It is one of the coolest things I’ve ever owned, forget about the rest of the bike. The ring of stainless bolts showing that it isn’t actually stamped steel but a two-piece wheel only adds to the old-school/high-tech aesthetic.

The front Dymag is a tubeless wire wheel with a carbon-fiber rim-again, old-school/high-tech. I was told it was the last one available, and it has a hub from a Ducati Monster. BrakeTech included drawings of the spacers needed to give its aftermarket discs the proper offset, and I had them machined locally.

I violated bobjob rules a bit to achieve a stripped-down aesthetic over a stripped-down reality. The stock fuel tank had plastic covers along its bottom sides, hiding the lumpy, rounded lower portions of the tank. Removing those pieces required having angles welded onto the edges of the tank so that it would follow the contour of the frame, and the mess remaining had to be filled. The late Jerry Graves, a wellknown builder in Fort Lauderdale, did the welding.

I filled all the way around the tank, making it clean and seamless. Once painted, though, its sides were huge slabs of gray, which was solved by adding Stomp Grip pads in black, visually breaking up the surface.

I wanted a primer finish, but real primer is crappy-looking, so I found a high-quality gray paint. Flames are pretty much cliché, but they are neces-

sary for any hod-rod enthusiast my age. I bent accepted practices by painting them in a subtle off-white and giving them the cutline from wingtip shoes. Body parts were then given a satin clearcoat for the look of dull, cheap primer paint-if that makes sense.

The gauge mount is hand-shaped diamond plate. Because the air-intake snorkel openings, usually hidden behind the fairing, now looked too unfinished, I found velocity stacks that with minor modification fit neatly into the holes. Velocity stacks are just plain cool, so any excuse to use them is fine.

The Pirelli Diablo Superbike slick rear tire and treaded Diablo III up front are homage to rat-rods with cheater slicks, and to the original Schwinn Stingray Apple Krate bicycle that my mom wouldn’t let me have. Pirelli is strictly opposed to mounting disparate rubber on a motorcycle, and I assure them, and all citizens, that that combination is for display purposes only; with a tag and matching treaded tires is how you’ll find me on the highway.

I struggled over the exhaust until realizing that the elaborate 4-into-2 system I’d planned was too complex for a bob-job. The HotBodies Racing megaphone-looking inadequate, amputated and home-built-is perfect. It’s loud, though. Too loud. So I wear earplugs and short-shift around town.

A White Rock soda bottle takes care of coolant overflow, and a Moon oil-pressure gauge takes care of looking like a Moon oil-pressure gauge. It’s unnecessary but I’ve been dying to own a Moon product for 40 years, so shut up about it. Interestingly, the galley plug and Jegs fittings to connect it cost four times as much as the gauge! The sleeves on the radiator hoses were too unfinished, even for a stock bike. My friend Ren stitched red cuffs on the frayed ends of each.

This bike is never going to be the coolest bike to anyone else, but that’s okay because it is the embodiment of what everyone’s coolest bike should be, a bike that you have made uniquely yours.

Nah, forget all this. The coolest bike is a Bimota SB6... □