"This one’s not for the feint hearted, but the seating position is original and the bar positions are comfortable. It first turned a wheel for the Distinguished Gent’s Ride in London and is great to ride. The throttle’s smooth and responsive with ‘bags’ of grunt. The end cans are decorative, so even though the exhaust’s been ‘choked’ to get the right back-pressure, it barks like a very big dog."
Grumpy fuel injection and mega wiring looms are not really café racer attributes so the whole lot was pulled off. It just kept getting better and better! A discussion with an old buddy Richard Oakes of Blackjack Cars seeded the idea of a single twin-choke Weber carb, but our 44 IDF is ‘down draught’, straddling the main frame (well it’s got to go somewhere!). Carb balancing was eliminated, but a big hole in the fuel tank was needed. The pipe work for the inlet and the desire to run the exhaust over the ‘heads, started to give the look we were after and The Pipeline’ was christened. There was only one way forward – mega industrial.
From the simple Guzzi frame hangs some pretty cool components, WP53mm USD forks and hefty twin disc Brembos are standard and give the bike a pretty full on attitude. The asymmetric swing arm was sprung by a WP remote reservoir shock, but to keep the clean line of the back end, we’ve replaced it with a Hagon unit. The seating position is per the original bike, as we wanted it to be really rideable and the foot control hangers are one of the main chassis components, so they were staying although removed of all the subframe mounts. Returning the bike to its stock 70 series rear tyre courtesy of Avon, helped with both the stance and look of the bike. Hel, did our new brake lines, complete with their Harley front line splitter, mounted under the bottom yoke.
Photos: @chrislanaway
Liquid error (sections/article-template line 16): Could not find asset snippets/relatedblogs.liquid