2014 FXDB Street Bob

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old School Street Bob

Believe it or not, this motorcycle was an impulse purchase. Although I had been looking at the Street Bob for a while, what really motivated me to walk into the dealer and get one was my trip from Austin to Terlingua on the Sportster. You know how in the movie Wild Hogs Dudley makes the trip from Cincinnati to the West Coast on a Sportster 1200C? Bollocks! Ain’t NO WAY he made that trip! That’s a pretty rugged cruise on a bike that small. I know, because halfway home from Terlingua all I could think about was how miserable I was and how much more comfortable the trip would have been on a Big Twin.

The day after I got home I went to the dealer and bought a Street Bob. Let me start by saying the FXDB is one of the best bikes Harley has made in years. It handles like a dream, has a clean bobber style with minimal clutter and no fluffy chrome doo-dads, and there are high technology improvements but only where they really matter.

The evolution of this build was based on a few requirements I had. I’m not really into touring but I wanted a bike I could use for the occasional road trip; I wanted to outfit this scoot with removable saddlebags (like I had done with the Heritage); and I wanted to do a more challenging build and customize this in a way that was distinctly different from all of the other Street Bobs on the road.

As for the occasional touring, this was a good choice. A few weeks after I got the bike I took it to Santa Fe and it was a very pleasant and comfy ride. This bike performed exactly as I had hoped it would. For luggage I had used a backpack on a sissy bar, and that made me decide to go back to saddlebags. That presented a design challenge, as the ready-made solutions for relocating the rear signals to accommodate bags are ugly and just plain wacky. I concluded that a whole new rear fender and radically relocated signals was needed, and this drove the evolution of the design.

I began to lean toward an FL style rear fender as a solution to the signal problem, but that also required a different front fender. Once I accepted that fact I was all in, and I thought about how I would integrate these details into a coherent design. I was inspired by some vintage Harleys I had seen and I started to noodle out the concept until I came up with what you see here.

This project was a pretty comprehensive build. Up until the final reassembly I had this thing on a lift with everything removed except the engine and rear wheel, and I probably should have pulled the rear wheel as well (more on that later).

I had a lot of great help with this project. As with every project the first stop has to be Bud’s Motorcycle Shop in Austin (R.I.P. Bud!). Aaron is my go-to guy whenever I need something, and sometimes I go there and just walk around and see what’s lying around and what ideas I can pick up. One day I found a bunch of headlamps, including one that had recently been powder coated gloss black. I grabbed that one, a nice 7” Softail housing with a Bosch lens and chrome outer ring to replace the little bobber-ish stock headlamp, and I used the stock wiring harness and lamp holder to begin creating an old-school look for the front end.

I also got a new front wheel built at Bud’s. I went with a 21” front wheel made from a mid-glide hub and a Harley Wide Glide rim. I got the biggest tire I could find in this size (90/90 21” Michelin) and bolted it up. Although I got a bigger visual effect on the front end with this configuration it only raised the front axle ½” and I didn’t need to lower the front. That’s good, because I like the handling and didn’t want to slam the bike, and this slightly increased axle height yielded little (if any) change in the way the bike handles.

The fenders are both from Klock Werks. The rear is a Benchmark builder’s series Softail fender with a 4" stretch, width increased by 1” to suit the wider Dyna rear end and front extended by 6" to reproduce the original coverage between the wheel and the frame. The front is a Benchmark bagger fender with Klock Werks adapter blocks, and that fender was narrowed by 1½” to suit the blocks within the mid-glide fork configuration.

Fender fab was once again done by Zac at Full Custom Fabrication in Bastrop. He’s a very busy guy (and for good reason), but I was able to get my baby on to his work schedule. He made all the needed mods to the fender blank and we agreed that he’d fit the fender as low as possible to give it that classic tail dragger look. Mission accomplished, and the final product is spectacular! Same with the front, but it was a simpler task as we only needed to make it narrow and nothing else. The welds are simply a work of art.

I got the rear fender home and fitted my rear signals, the same ones used in the Sportster and trimmed for a tighter clearance by East Side Fabrication, who also drilled out the 2” black Biltwell Gordo risers to accommodate the Milwaukee Twins 1¼” beach bars that I saved from the Heritage. Everything bolted up as planned, which is always nice.

For paint I went back to Austin Paintworks with a big question mark in my head. I was still stumped on the paint scheme. I knew it would be black and I was leaning toward flat black, but my ideas just weren’t landing in my brain like they should have. Although I liked the flat black idea it was just too much like all of those Sons of Anarchy imitators that are rolling around these days, and I definitely wanted something very different from the run-of-the-mill S.O.A. wannabe scoot.

Matt was patient and we discussed ideas, and I showed him images that inspired me for this project and we came up with the bike you see here. I find that my projects tend to evolve even while the build is in progress, and this was no exception. We ended up going with gloss black instead of flat. And did we ever! The Sporty’s paint was great, but this was a concourse-grade deep gloss black that just knocked my eyes out! Side-by-side in my garage the difference between these bikes is astounding.

Again, the paint was done in plenty of time for the Republic of Texas motorcycle rally, but before that I took a trip north to Amarillo to see family. The new seat and handlebar configuration proved to be very comfortable, and I got a chance to shake out all of modifications and upgrades and had time to retighten and readjust everything before the ROT Rally.

There were some times when I really wondered if this was going to end up looking right or if I was just building an expensive pile of junk. But after paint and assembly things really took on a new look, and the end result is spectacular. The bike gets a lot of attention and when I park it people walk up to me and start asking questions even before I get the kickstand down. It’s really satisfying to have the motorcycle that only exists in your head become the motorcycle that exists in real life, and I’d say this build was a success on all counts.