ALL BIKES ONE DESTINATION

I never thought this would ever happen in my lifetime. Sure, Royal Enfield enthusiasts started the movement and the manufacturer furthered the cause. But till date, the only big motorcycle meet in the country was limited to Royal Enfield bikes alone.

Things are changing, however. Finally, here's a bike fest happening and it's open to everyone who rides anything with two wheels with a motor slung in between for good effect! Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the India Bike Week that's going to over run Goa between the 2nd and 3rd of February 2013.

Judging from the launch party, I can safely say that they love their motorcycles. Any band of blokes who doll up the entrance with a pristine Norton Manx 350 and an unmolested vintage AJS gets my vote. The Harleys were there and so were the Beemers and as usual, the Bullet riding boys were there too in  good strength. What seemed cool to me was that a solitary RX 100 cafe made it too, and had its own spotlight!

What's better is that the boys behind that awesome Helmet Stories motorcycle blog, good friends Vir Nakai and Harsh Man Rai, are heavily involved.

I'm going to be there. Don't know what I'll be riding though, but for once, it doesn't really matter. As long as you arrive with bugs on your visor and your jacket caked with dust, you'll be welcome! Good times beckon!

IN HINDSIGHT..

After loading up, post last week's shopping binge, with enough lights to brighten up Vegas, it was time to actually fix one on to a motorcycle. The RX project desperately needed a tail light and the contemplation that was oscillating between an old Lucas replica lamp to a mere strip of LEDs simply had gone on long enough.

I needed something that didn't mar the shape of the seat hump but at the same time, was large enough to actually be an effective tail light. Getting one that was what I had in mind was getting hard, till my recent shopping raid paid rich dividends.

So this is what Yellow Fever's rear end now looks like after a lot of drilling, filling and heaps of cussing. I apologise for seeming like tooting my own horn, but what the heck, I think it's come out looking like a million bucks!

F-LIGHT OF FANTASY

It's been awhile since I scribbled anything down here. But the thing is that this was intended to be a blog, not a cesspool of meaningless twat. And when I think I don't have anything worth mentioning, I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'll say nothing. Even if it means months of you staring at the same damn screen.

Anyway, I've been meaning to go out shopping for bike stuff - the kind of goodies that everyone seems to have seen somewhere but can't place where. My RX 100 project sorely needed a tail light, and my wallet was sore shelling out fines extracted by the well meaning men in uniform. And I thought to myself that illuminated parts are something that I could do with having around the shed, up for grabs at a moments notice.

Besides keeping your rear end from resembling pita bread, these things are great tools to keep you from noticing the flaws in a motorcycle. Don't know how to clean up that gangrenous tail of your new and spiffy customised motorcycle? I'll tell you what; just slap on the largest red light you can find back there and then never forget to proclaim how responsible a motorist you are whenever the occasion permits.

As with all things of this nature, the day you choose to actually get off your ass to get something done, the stars and fate sit together the night before, plotting on how to ruin whatever semblance of a plan you might have had. This time they concluded that rain coupled with unimaginable traffic would do wonders to fuck up my scheming.

I wouldn't have any of that, though. I mean, if it was for anything other than motorcycles, I probably wouldn't have even got out of bed and put on my slippers, but here I was going shop to shop to find the perfect specimen of something that I didn't even have the faintest of a clue about. I would go to the bloke behind the counter, ask him for lights with very accurate and helpful descriptions like 'long', 'circular' and 'motorcycle'.

This is what I ended up with, and in retrospect, I don't think any of the stuff I got home was ever intended to grace a motorcycle. I know for a fact that the olive green bits go into Indian Army jeeps while the spherical one in the centre appears to be a replica of what used to be fitted onto the old Nissan Patrols.

Sake racer...

Ever since my good friend and colleague Kartik Ware decided to get himself an RX 135, I was hooked. He got himself a runner (the logical thing to do) and I went ahead and landed up with the grand sum of an engine and registration papers of an RX (albeit the 100, not the 135). Why? Because I'm a mighty cheap fucker, that's why. The frame was later obtained and in a few months, I had myself a rolling piece of rusty crap. Now Kartik's the smarter of the two, and hence he wisely decided to get his built by a professional. I, the smart ass that I am (or so I think), decided to get about doing it all myself.

Kartik was building a Cafe Racer and so I decided to build a ratted out cafe/bobber. Why again? Well, because I'm mighty fucking cheap, that's why - a rat won't need fancy paint and that ought to save me a packet.

Using hi-tech computer rendering software, in other words Microsoft Paint, I put down my ideas  - great because it allows you to refer to your thoughts about something even at a later date. I knew it had to have the Japanese Rising Sun on the flanks and to save some more money, I thought I'd scrape the tank and the rear bumstop to the bare metal, polish them, paint on the graphics and then lacquer the whole darn things. It came out looking top notch, I reckon. Now, I'm as good with a paint brush as I am with my light sabre and so I let the experts do all of that - my darling girlfriend Lourdes and my great buddy Vikas. Vikas is the same guy whose C10 crankcases got pinched from my cunt shed. Not once but twice. And he's the one guy I can count on to share most of my crazy motorised adventures with.

Anyway, I've never worked on Japanese motorcycles before and I have come to realise that unlike their British kin, they can actually be dismantled without the requirement of a hammer, chisel or a welding torch. I've gotten rid of everything that belies the principle of form over function and that has made this motorcycle quite feather-like indeed. No battery, no mudguards and certainly not those plastic side panels. An instrument cluster is for wimps, I thought to myself. Ha, who needs that, then? Truth be told, I didn't want to spend on a brand new one but now I'm digressing....

This motorcycle is the most bastardised bike I own, and I say that with pride. Apart from the engine, frame, triple clamps and the rear shocks, pretty much every thing else is anything but stock Yamaha RX 100 shit. The front end consists of Bajaj Pulsar forks and disc setup, Bajaj Avenger wheels and Yamaha R15 rubber. The aft is the sum of a Yamaha Gladiator box-sectioned swingarm, RX drum spoked to an Avenger rim and R15 tyre. The stock muffler kinda gave it a nerd-with-a-hooker-mom sort of look and so I went with an after market expansion chamber. It says Proton but the thing looks like it was made in somebody's WC - the welds are tacky, the steel sheet is wafer-thin and the thing's flimsy like paper. It does sound neat though, especially without the rear 'can' but I don't want to be jailed before the end of next week.

I haven't worked out the lighting entirely as yet but from the looks of things, I'm going with an old Triumph headlight that I had in my meagre collection of odd-ball spares. It's a genuine Lucas item, and probably comes from a 3HW. Yep, that's pretty old. The tail light I'm thinking of plonking on is also a period WW2 unit but I've just got one spare and that's making me quite hesitant. This is after all a fun and small budget build and I can't really handle an NOS WD part going AWOL from a bike like this.

I've put up a few photos of the bike being built and how it stands as of tonight. The photos of the completed Yellow Fever will follow as and when the work's all done. Let's hope it's not too far from now...

On wheels. Just.

No prizes for guessing - a Bullet Standard bar, fitted the other way around

Mock-up number 12645738129

Remember that Triumph headlight I was telling you about?

Seat hump fabricated out of an old Honda scooter's front mudguard

My attempt at night photography.

Another one...

Okay, so I wasn't getting any sleep and I had ample time to kill. So sue me...