I CAN REMEMBER IT, BUT FOOTAGE IS SCARCE
It was an 883 Sportster. I bought it with the money the army sent me after my 11 months of involuntary service, but eventually I decided I wanted more from it than a Sportster was designed to give.
UPDATE:
I was looking for camping footage and found some more shots of Hawk-8 from camping trips where I rode her into the mountains off-road:
In the three above, I’ve done the exhaust, but the seat is not completed yet.
You cant see much of it, but the custom exhaust and seat that I made are on there in this one :)
Adventure Rider Pages
I documented the entire build. Every custom made part, every off the shelf replacement, every hiccup and problem, all photographed and described on the Adventure Rider forums. Unfortunately, the photos were stored with Photobucket, which apparently sucks and doesnt actually keep images hosted unless you pay them. I wish I had known about Hive back then, because I’ve lost all the pictures of the later updates.
My name on the forum was * I Am Murphy*, it was a reference to Murphy’s Law (If it can go wrong, it will.), based on my experience in building a custom motorcycle - which did require a lot of patience and perseverance.
I changed the belt drive to a chain drive, added Lynx fairing and a Vapor digital gauge. It required me to make a custom triple tree, but I replaced the entire front end with forks wheel and fender from a 1986 Honda XL600R. The new forks caused the handle bars to hit the fuel tank though, so I had to cut away a portion of the tank and weld in an inverted round. Since i was already reworking the tank, I added a sight gauge tube and a hand stamped plate that told of my phenomenal exploits :)
TRIP FOOTAGE
As the day began, I was working on the electrical systems, hoping like hell I’d have it ready in time. Today was the day I was supposed to leave on a three day bike cruise through the mountains with my dad - and I did NOT want to be the reason we had to miss a day.
At this point in time I still had the stock exhaust on there. Eventually I welded up a custom exhaust from the Harley exhaust headers and a Kawasaki Ninja pipes/muffler…man that baby ran quiet as an assassin!
And just like that, we were off for the mountains!
Almost as soon as we left, we got hit with a downpour that followed us all day long. My waterproof Matterhorn boots became like pint glasses, with my pruny little feet crammed down in liquid up to the top 🤣
We stopped occasionally to get a picture of the scenery. I think that was less my dad’s desire, and maybe just more like something he was willing to put up with :)
Of course I had an electrical problem at the start of day 2…I’m Murphy!
Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention, day 2 was also completely rainy 🤣
Didn’t matter though, the mountains were gorgeous all the same. The air was crisp and light, and although it rained off and on all day, that means it also was fresh and crisp off and on all day ;)
After three days in the saddle, I came home and got straight to work on a custom seat. It was made from a used seat pan, a memory foam pillow, and about 50,000 scraps of various colors of leather, sewn into a gorgeous mosaic…so far I have not found one pitcure of my beautiful work, but if i ever do find it I’ll let you know :)
source
Good trip in yours motorcycle.
Thank you! Yes, this was a really special time/memory with my dad - I'm very grateful we were able to take time to do this :)
That is just awesome! Might be the best Sportster build ever! I absolutely love the look and it also looks functional.
I'm working on doing my own seat to for my DR650 too. Love the bike, hate the seat, although my ass is finally getting used to it. It aches on iron butt days over a few hundred miles. I'm currently looking for a seat pan to start experimenting with. Corbin seats and Sargent are just to expensive for what they are IMHO. I'd rather build my own and use the savings for an adventure or performance parts.
Thanks my Dood!
The one I took off was a Corbin LOL! I was super bummed (no pun intended) when that seat wasn't everything I had hoped for. I think I paid like $280 for it, although it was a while back. If you are making your own seat, I'll share one thing I learned: don't use only memory foam...it seemed like a great idea, but the memory foam compresses down to basically nothing and it's almost like riding on a naked pan. I think a layer of memory foam on top of a more dense foam would have been a lot better. I wanna see what you end up doing with that!