and a 1972 frame,
add lots of hard work and the ideas of Kyril Dambuleff and
You have this dream bike that He calls, ‘Bikini’,
the bike started with just an engine that had been rebuilt
by Kyril from the ground up, ‘It sat on my workbench for months, taking up much
needed space,’ he says. ‘I thought about displaying it somehow, perhaps in my
office, but what could be better than an original frame?’
Kyril went about accumulating all the parts over the coming
months – the frame, wheels, exhaust pipes, forks and tyres and all the other
sundries that come from assembling a ground-up bike, but the focus was to
remain the powerplant,
the finished tank slopes up hard on the right hand side to
expose the spark plug leads and the coil, on the left it retains something
close to the original lines, ‘The idea was to showcase the engine and have all of it in
complete and unobstructed view with nothing hidden,’ he explains, ‘Everything
else had to conform accordingly, hence the asymmetrical tank and all the other
exposed components which shows what makes a motorcycle tick, it’s like one of
those skeleton watches in which the maker has left only what’s essential and
tried to reveal as much of what makes the watch tick as possible’
now this is also really neat, the exhaust headers, it’s not polished stainless steel but
Cerakote applied with a mirror finish, Cerakote is actually a polymer-ceramic
coating that’s usually applied to firearms, often in camouflage or flat earthen
colours, it’s a neat process that’s very heat and distortion resistant and
should ensure a mirror-like finish for years, the engine was blasted and
polished the cylinder was bored out to 59mm and new Wiseco pistons installed, compression was taken up to 10:1 and displacement is now 553cc’s, like an
original cafe racer this one is considerably lighter than stock, Kyril’s target
weight was 350 pounds (158kg) and with the anti-gravity battery, aluminium parts
and tricky things like the adjustable foot peg positioner he nearly managed to
hit that with the bike weighing in at 357lbs, ‘I think I could have hit 350,’
he explains, ‘but I had to replace the front single disc with a twin disc setup
that was irresistible’, and that is what I think about this motorbike, irresistible.
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