kawasaki f7-175 street tracker by busch & busch

more emails. this time it’s from some wackos from the nevada desert. from reno, lance busch bush & busch automotive sent some killer pix and info about their kickass kawasaki f7-175 street tracker. it’s a two-stroke thumper. my favorite (this week). here’s what lance wrote:

Hey Trent, here’s some photos of our 1971 Kawasaki F7 175. It started life as an old rotary-valve enduro but was just too **** dorky lookin’ to do anything with. So my brother and I decided one weekend we were going to chop it up and make a cool brat-style lane splitter out of it.

The most offensive part of the bike had to be the terrible 15″ wide, 15 pound seat and horribly over-sized rear fender/light. So we ditched the seat and made our own out of a sheet metal base that we bead rolled and shaped to the frame rails and topped with a couple dense foam pads. It’s now about two inches thick and 1/10 of the weight! We covered that with some affordable black vinyl and bolted it down.

We then cut six inches out of the rear frame rails and rolled the rear fender up about six inches. At the same time we replaced the rear tail light (a three pound monstrosity) with a universal rubber enduro tail light. The only mod it needed was a swap to a six volt tail light bulb.

The front end was then lowered by removing the factory “helper” spring and replacing it with a two inch section of solid tube. This brought the front down about four inches.

Now it was time to bring the oil tank and exhaust in closer to the center of the bike to match the seat’s new profile. This required us to section out three inches of the oil tank so that we could tuck it in between the frame rails, rather than sit on top of them. The battery box was also modified to run between the exhaust and oil tank and was shortened an inch to clear the fender.

The exhaust required a four inch section (as well as the stock heat shield) to be cut and a whole new end cap to spit the exhaust gasses out past the frame rail that it tucked into. However, all this work was worth it in the end because the bike is about four inches narrower in the center section and several pounds lighter.

I then swapped the handlebars from some kooky bicycle-shaped bars by Wald and narrowed them up a bit. The whole time I was making these mods, my brother Danny was making a new front fender, fender stay, tank guard, flyscreen, and of course custom knurled kick start **** out of aluminum. Nothing screams custom racer like lightweight, effective part additions like that.

The hubs, brake backing plates and rims were painted black to match the frame, and the bodywork was capped off in Arctic White. In the end we shed about 20 pounds off the stock weight of 220. All the work was done in about a week with two people’s labor and with a budget of about $75 on a street-titled bike we spent about $500 on! What we ended up with was an ultra-affordable, ultra-clean hybrid cafe/flat track racer! We got two of these from the same seller and have already started modding the second one. Stay tuned!

we’ll do just that that, lance. great bike, killer price, hard work done fast and clean. congratulations.

check out the busch brothers at busch & busch for more killer custom bikes, hot rods and more.

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