Life can be full of regrets. Standing there in silence at the school gates when your mind is telling you to ask the hot girl to the movies, pulling that wheelie down the high street past a police car and failing to get away and spending too much time titting around with KDX and TZR 125s. The current custom scene is an incredibly exciting thing to be part of and if I was offering advice to any young person at the beginning of their two wheeled voyage I’d insist they scrap any plans to finance a mass produced, plastic clad 125 and get creative in the workshop. And if a workshop is a distant dream, deliver all the papers in the land, wash every dirty car and cut lawn until sunset to pay someone else to build you something.
Hélder Moura of Dream Wheels Heritage in Portugal have done just that for a customer who didn’t have their full bike licence, creating a street scrambler from the ever popular, pizza delivering Honda CLR City Fly. The provenance of the donor was more important than condition, as paperwork is important in Portugal, so an ex-Pizza Hut hack was found and offered a new lease of life.
Once naked, the transformation could begin. Firstly with the fabrication of new subframe and seat pan. The seat itself is the handiwork of local buddy Luís Conrado, and anyone who’s ridden small capacity machines will know that it’s all about momentum so there are grippy bits and slippery bits to ensure roundabouts can be hit flat out.
The zorst is custom pipework into a repacked FMF Mega Max II silencer which should add a bit of aural speed to the riding experience. Side covers are of course one-offs with artwork to match the Yamaha FS1e fuel tank, hand painted by Pitta Designs. Behind the covers hides a new battery in a neater box.
After a fat front tyre, a set of beefier forks is perhaps the single easiest way to improve the look of leaner-legal machinery. The spindly originals have been superseded by a pair of rebuilt upsidedowners from a Suzuki RMX50, which have been lowered 150mm. The better quality triple clamps were also carried over, furnished with Renthal Fatbars and vintage grips.
The stumpy mudguards were made in-house and are a token gesture to keeping the rain at bay, rather than suggesting off-road capability. 18″ x 4.00 Heidenau K67 trials tyres are super soft and grippy on tarmac whilst knobbly enough for the odd excursion to the loose stuff. The front wheel, complete with brake, is from a Yamaha XS400 while the rear hub has been laced with new spokes to an Excel rim.
A normal gas cap wouldn’t have done Pitta’s paint job justice so Hélder repurposed a fridge magnet. The speedo is a Daytona unit for simplicity, a rev counter on a single cylinder 125 is a bit of a pointless exercise, just wait for the vibrations to plateau and then change up. Neater switcher gear on the left side is courtesy of Blitz Motorcycles in France.
Although the engine had been used to spread doughy pleasure across Porto, the under-stressed, well engineered single needed little more than a good service and a coat of paint before being reunited with the frame. A K&N filter and NGK plug lead the only nod towards performance, the lead is red though which must mean more horsepowers.
Marketing is everything these days, so Dream Wheels fit laser engraved rolling business cards to their builds.
No urban hack is complete without a skateboard rack so Hélder fabricated an easily removable one allowing the customer an alernative should the Porto traffic snarl-up too much even for a bike.
If you’re motivated to get out there and build your own leaner legal funster the Dream Wheels guys have further photos from the build process here. If I was 17 again I’d want something expressive and nimble like this CityFly, although probably with a slightly longer seat, just in case that hot girl needed a lift back from the movies.
Thanks to Pedro Marcelino for the wonderful photographs.
via The Bike Shed
