how’s that for a title?
found this nifty little in-progress motorbike on our friend juan’s r4yl 3.0 blog and it seemed my friendly blog linker-toer motoguru was involved in the build. i emailed him to see what the deal was and he was kind enough to reply pdq to write he’d take better pix than what was online and shoot them at me.
and he did. i respect a man who does what he says. this is the little beast:
motoguru’s buddy rich at magneto industries was building a 1975 kawasaki h2 mach iv and he wanted to ride it in juan’s r4yl ride on august 5th. that’s a ride around findlay, ohio for about 80 miles to end up with live music, burnouts, beer, sausage, and the festivities a bunch of bikers create when they camp out ten miles away from the starting point. it’s about the ride, not the beer and music, right?
right.
then you wake up and think about coffee or cooking some eggs and bacon and hash browns over the campfire while you drink what’s left of the beer. you always bring twice as much beer as you think you should for two reasons:
1. others won’t and you’ll be cool for offering one.
2. beer for breakfast!
magneto industries is the garage half of moto’s and rich’s friend al. he has a recording studio, rustbelt studios in the other half of the building. when the bankers ripped off millions of gullible first-time homeowners and real estate investors while losing their own money in the process, they decided to pass their f**k ups back to us, and rich decided to work on bikes in the extra space to make ends meet. magento insustries was born.
this is actually al’s bike, and rich and moto-g (he’s a dj on friday’s at shenanigans) decided the other night that it needs to get finished so they can play with it. al has soft spot for old kawasaki triples and has a few of them in various states of disrepair/refurbishing but he is too busy too work on them.
good news for rick!
al has at least one important reason to dig the mach iv. it was a monster. at 75hp and 57 ft/lbs, it was a very fast – and loud – machine that weighed a relatively nimble 450lb. my guess is that moto and rick have shaved at least 150lbs off the original and with the motor work they’ve done to it, added a few ponies.
in kawasaki’s original literature for the bike, they wrote that the 750 mach iv, “has only one purpose in life: to give you the most exciting and exhilarating performance. it’s so quick it demands the razor-sharp reactions of an experienced rider. it’s a machine you must take seriously.”
the one on this page is much more serious than that.
the general build stats are as follows:
+ 1975 Kawasaki H2 Mach IV 750 inline-three motor with Fast by Gast Stage 3 top end.
+ 1974 Kawasaki H1 frame. End of frame and seat modified by James of the Detroit Bros to accept the aluminum tail section.
+ Norton Manx tank with oil tank built into it on the right side.
+ 1989 Yamaha FZR Swingarm and rearsets.
+ 2000 Suzuki GSXR front end with LSL top clamp/bar kit.
+ XS650 hubs laced to a stock Triumph front rim and some random Akront rear rim.
+ Some random expansion chambers.
i dig it. come back to bikerMetric and see what the beast looks and sounds like at a future date yet to be determined. hopefully before august 5th.
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