If you were down in the smoke a few days ago for Bike Shed London 2015 you will have seen the Kevils quartet of customs in Quayside 1, just a few metres away from the bar. Handy. In the ‘Shed we refer to bobbers as the perfect hangover bike, something you can just swing a leg over, sit back and let the breeze blow away the fugg. For the concept to work you need a laid-back riding position and some proper clout between your legs. This is one of Kevils Speed Shop’s few goes at building a bobber as Kev has previously shied away from them and stuck to scramblers and café racers.
For this build Kevils teamed up with Clive Cook of Crobba Customs, famous for his BSA Bantam powered Butchers Bike (click the link and take a look, well worth it). Clive is a talented welder and fabricator and had been subcontracting at the Kevils Devonshire HQ before taking the plunge, sacking in a 10 year career as a commercial generator engineer to go it alone and follow his passion. Yup, the familiar story of the heart winning over the head and thankfully another person doing what they were born to do, in this case hand-making custom handlebars amongst other things moto-related.
Bobbers need to be clean, lean and low. One of the best ways to achieve this is to bin the springy bits and go hardtail, so that’s what Kev and Clive did, chopping the central spine out of the Beemer’s frame and running 2 tubes down to pick-up the rear axle. With the shaft-drive set level the rear frame was triangulated and welded in place. Nice and wide though to accept the 5.00 x 16 rear Avon Safety Mileage, after all, it’s that fat sidewall that’ll be soaking up the bumps.
To make a hangover bike work there’s no alternative for cubes, and the ’77 R100/7 motor is the full fat model sporting a set of Mikunis on pod filters and a free flowing exhaust. As per usual with a Kevils build the engine is completely stripped, refurbished and rebuilt using proper parts.
Obviously an RD350 tank wasn’t going to work here so Kev shaped a block of foam before fibreglassing it and handing it over to Paul the aluminium expert who rolled out and mirror polished this great shape. A bobber with a decent fuel capacity, who knew?
As anyone with an R-series knows, the forks are limited by the top clamp. To slam the front end of the Bomber a Kevils billet yoke with pinch bolts was utilised, which also allows a set of one-off Crobba Customs bars to be clamped to the remaining fork stanchion.
Clean and lean comes from perfecting the game of electrical hide and seek. Motogadget currently sell the best range of space saving gauges, so there’s one nestling in the headlight bucket along with the rest of the new, slimmed down wiring harness.
An off-the-shelf bobber seat was trialled but the curved shape just didn’t look right, so a café-style unit was fabricated, and upholstered in black leather. The kick-up at the rear should be enough to keep one’s bum planted once the throttle is cracked and five inches of rubber bite down hard, uninterrupted by suspension.
As with all his builds, Kev needed a name so chose Bomber, as play on words between a Beemer and a bobber. Lucky the donor wasn’t a Buell!
To keep an eye on new builds, order your dream custom BMW or buy parts of the shelf for a project head to the Kevils Speed Shop Facebook page or website.
Photos by Ashley Kent, via The Bike Shed
