Taking a café dream to reality
Even though I have owned many sportbikes, standards, and classic café racers, I fantasized for years about building a Harley Sportster café racer.
I’m an older guy—66 at this point—and I have always had a weakness for cafe motorcycles. My definition of a real café racer is not an H-D with peanut tank and no fenders- that’s a “bobber” fergodssakes! It has to be a classically-styled street bike with clip-ons and rear sets, and some sort of sexy exhaust and body work. H-D tried building their own Sportster-based café racer, the XLCR, from 1977-79. It was a bike they couldn’t give away when new but now are valuable collector bikes. They had 57 HP, a 4-speed transmission and other than café racer styling were otherwise unremarkable.
The “empty canvas”- 2007 Harley-Davidson Sportser 883.
I wanted to base my Sportster café project on a more modern Sportster- something with fuel injection, better brakes and suspension. But the biggest challenge on these bikes is how to get rid of the “raked” look that all Sportsters have. The shape of the tapered teardrop fuel tank is all wrong for a serious café bike with clip-ons and rearsets.
So in 2016, after a lot of thinking and immediately after my second divorce, I acquired a 2007 Sportster 883 locally that I found on Facebook Marketplace. It was a pretty basic model (I’m no expert on Sportsters and their naming conventions although I have owned five of them) grey with a silver cast engine and cast aluminum wheels. I knew I did not want anything with a chrome engine like the Sportster “72” I had at the time, nor anything with a 21” front wheel. Would not work for my purposes. This was a clean, original bike with new tires on it that ran perfectly.
Deconstruction before reconstruction.
It did, however, have a bad aftermarket chrome sidecover, chrome crash bars, forward-mounted controls, and a windshield on it- for about an hour after I got it home (See pics above). Never been a fan of any of that junk!
I also pulled the fuel tank, seat, sidecovers, rear shocks (needed some about an inch longer to get rid of rake), handlebars, air filter, exhaust, and front forks off of it. I found a source online that made custom alloy café racer tanks to rid my bike of the raked look common to all of these H-Ds, that is based in India. After a couple emails where they assured me the tank would bolt on and the fuel pump mount would match the one on my bike, I sent them some cash electronically. About a week later, an absolutely perfect alloy tank arrived, well-packaged and without a scratch. I also ordered a leather top strap from them to complete the look.
Starting to come together.
I found some rearsets for the bike from another online supplier. He was slow and expensive- the rearsets cost about $900- but they transformed the way the bike shifted. Shifts went from loose and sloppy to a precise, “snick, snick, snick” affair immediately. It was fantastic!
I took the seat pan to my buddy, a local upholster, who concocted a beautiful brown humped café seat with black piping on it to my spec. I bought some fork gaiters, Progressive Suspension fork springs, and alloy clip-on bars, all from online sources. I moved the headlight down with some new bracketry and installed some cool brown British grips and alloy bar-end mirrors. Black painted sidecovers with “900” emblems (thank you Saab), retro H-D tank decals, XR1200 exhaust, longer black painted rear shocks, and finned alloy air filter completed the look. And voila! There was the H-D Sportster Café I always wanted, for less than $5000.
Looking good!
The bike rode amazingly well. The riding position was awesome and it handled decently. It wasn’t fast with only 50 hp, and was a tank just to move around the garage, but it had an all-new personality that transformed it. I kept the bike about 4-5 years and eventually sold it to my friend Dr. Nirmal Kilambi, who is a urologist.
The finished bike, and the good doctor trying it on for size when I sold it to him.
Dr. Kilambi still has the bike. I helped him install a new battery a short while back and rode it around a little for him, but he has ridden it very little and told me recently he may sell it. Hmm, maybe a buy-back is in order?
In any case, it’s a great bike that gets tons of attention every time it’s ridden. And that’s the story of my Harley Sportster café racer!
Mark “MZ” Zweig
Would like to know what brand of exhaust you used.
Hey, Kenneth. That was a stock HD XR 1200 exhaust. Loved the look but was too quiet.