Back In The 1970s,

I loved the look of cafe racers,

and still do now, the look is that of a motorcycle you could take on the road, that looked like they were racing motorcycles, and the look still goes on today,

 like this one, 

created by George Baker who is just a one guy operation, based out of Southern California, he has created his own cafe racer based around a 900SS two valve Ducati,

 and it’s George’s first attempt at building a one-off custom motorcycle, “I decided the best way to go was to dive in head first and start from scratch rather than using a donor bike,” he recalls, “The thought process behind that decision was that every component and system would have to be thought out and made to work together with a vision in my mind of what a modern Ducati cafe racer would look like”,

 “To give it a more traditional horizontal line like early cafe racers I used a 1979 Honda CBX fuel tank”,

 “I’ve owned a couple of different Ducati models in the past,” he says, “so I decided on a air-cooled two valve motor as the base. The engine’s simplicity and lack of needing to deal with the aesthetics of a liquid cooling system lends itself to a cafe racer design”,

the upper frame tubes were heated and bent to better match the line formed by the bottom end of the fuel tank,

 there’s performance modifications like the beefy Brembo front brake set up, single sided swingarm conversion, wheel swap and Ohlins suspension, and a smattering of tidy aesthetic touches like the recessed brake light,

 He went with a 900cc carbureted model as his basis, George stripped down the engine and rebuilt it with new Mikuni carbs, matched to a pair of velocity stacks with filter elements, aftermarket ignition coils deal with the spark, while a new pair of shorty Cone Engineering steel silencers round out the exhaust, unfortunately I could not find George's web site, or for that matter the site of the photographer, Olivier de Vaulx who took these stunning photographs, but what a credit to both concerned.