KEVILS RIVA

The latest custom Boxer to roll out of Kevils Speedshop is this 1981 R100 commissioned by Kris, a restaurant owner based just off the coat of Belgium. Having just spent the weekend there we can vouch for there being some beautifully smooth roads, complete with sweeping curves – despite the flat landscape.

Kris and his wife visited Kev in his Paignton workshop on a rainy day back in February. The brief was to build a bike themed on the Riva speedboats he’d seen on Lake Garda in Italy, with their richly polished wood and brightly coloured turquoise and chrome fittings.

Undaunted by the idea of building a bike designed to emulate a boat, Kev and his team set to work on modifying the punchy R100 donor into something with German engineering rebuilt to Devon standards, with a touch of Italian style.

This is the first Kevils bike to have all the cast alloy components vapour blasted, which gives a lovely finish that matches the bright silver powdercoated framework, and was perfect for the brief on this build.

The subframe, block-like seat and integrated luggage rack all sit very high on this build, as Kris is quite tall. This was matched with high mountings for the front and rear fenders and braced bars with a higher sweep than usual.

Black satin powdercoat is complemented by chrome and and polished alloy. The turquoise paint is actually “almond green” from the Ruby Helmets colour catalogue, which was originally to match a new helmet Kris had wanted, but in the end he got a black one.

As with all Kevils bikes, this was a full, ‘nut & bolt, ground-up build’  with every part refreshed, rebuilt, replaced or upgraded, using many of Kevil’s own parts, including the high-level brushed stainless steel exhaust system, top yoke plate and front mudguard stays. The end result is a bike that’s as good as – or better than – new.

Thanks again to Kev Hill for sharing his latest creation, and to Ashley Kent for the photos, taken appropriately enough in a disused boat shed in Dartmouth.

See more from Kevils Speedshop here on The Bike Shed’s Kevils pages, their Facebook page and Website.

via The Bike Shed