Yeah, yeah, I know this is a Harley site for Barnett Harley-Davidson and you’re looking for anything 45-degree V-twin, but this little anonymous-looking 233cc vertical twin probably got a pretty big percentage of current Motor Company riders their motorcycle endorsement and their asses on a motorcycle that made Milwaukee famous. Unlike a lot of the H-D riders I’ve met who conveniently forget they might have started out on some form of two-wheeled tiddler like this and didn’t purchase a Road King or a Fat Boy for their first bike, who are you guys?

 

   If you’ve been riding since you were just old enough to get a license, you’ve got something like this in your background and it’s not a bad thing to admit. I always figured anybody who had a brand new big boy Harley for a first bike didn’t start riding until they were in their thirties and could afford one. You and I may have started out on a silly little thing of a bike because it was all a teenager could afford, but we did get an extra 20-years of riding in over the purists including time spent on a move up the Harley ladder with some old cranky Shovelheads and such thrown in over time. All it means is that somewhere out there are a lot of highly-used Rebels with a list of newbie owners as long as your arm holding up garages, sheds, and cellar walls all across the USA. Honda knocked this model out for 24 years so how many are lying around is probably unfathomable.

 

    Our mystery builder apparently ran into one of the early drum brake models that had probably led a highly abused life at the hands of novices and was put out to pasture until it turned back into the raw materials it came from. Even if the rest of the bike was crap and I’m sure it was, the little vertical twin probably still ran like a charm with a bit of coaxing. It had a claimed output at the crank of 26hp, but I think that was very optimistic with a top speed approaching just 70mph on a good day with no headwind and a slight downhill grade. It was probably more like 15hp at the rear wheel, but hey at least it had two wheels and at 16 everything’s an adventure.

 

  Back to our mystery builder who not only customized a Rebel without resorting to some chrome add-ons and calling it a day, but basically built a new rigid frame with lots and lots of  voluptuously curved tubing as a new home for the power house of an engine. No more swingarm and shocks that made the bike so kind to beginners, it was full speed forward building a rigid bobber that was pretty damn involved for a project of this small-cc magnitude. Engine mods consisted of removing the stock silencers (and they were really silencers) and trimming the header pipe back a bit for style before wrapping everything in header wrap. The stock air box hit the trash to be replaced by a velocity stack with a thin filter on the opening for the mighty single carb shoving gas into this bike to the tune of 70-80mpg. I doubt if any of these mods gave it any additional horsepower, but it surely picked up some additional noise that sure gave it some bad boy attitude. Oh it’s a beast!

 

 

   But wait, there’s more ─ a hell of a lot more. Oh you know little things like that underslung fuel tank that got fabbed up by our mystery builder. That’s a gem of a tank with an external sight gauge and an external glass fuel filter like on an old oil burner furnace. Kinda cool if I do say so myself. Same goes for the fabbed battery box and sprung seat which somebody really put some serious time and effort into. I’m not exactly sure what the cylindrical “oil” tank is under the seat area as the Rebel is a wet sump engine that doesn’t need a separate tank like a Harley, but it looks bobber cool. I’m assuming it’s for coils and electrical stuff, but if you’ve got a better idea, I’d love to know.

 

   Although the wheels are stock laced wheels, a touch of twin-tone paint and meatier than stock tires both front and rear gets it further away from a previous life of driving circles around orange cones in a parking lot and closer to being a bad boy, er, maybe a bad little boy, of the open road. Flat bars, a set of almost-rearsets, and a leather covered solo seat finish of the mechanical aspect of the build.

 

  Where this bike takes a shine is the paint. The delightfully-done candy apple red paint with crème panels on the gas tank and “oil tank” end plates surely push this bike further from a learning tool to a kinda cool ride to buzz around on. The Ruff Bitch graphics on the tank might be referring to the hardtail and maybe the engine’s running characteristics with the shorty, no-back-pressure headers and open carb or maybe just both. I’ll have to take our mystery builder’s word that one of the most milquetoast of bikes ever is now a Ruff Bitch in its new life.

 

   If you’ve ever had a hankering to build a bike and wanted to learn to actually do more than bolt on chrome parts or doo-dads, a project like this would be a great education. You probably wouldn’t even lose money when it came time to sell. These silly things are everywhere and you probably know of a couple kicking around just waiting for a new life.  There are two sitting in neighbors’ garages right near me that I’ve never ever seen outside. Maybe I should go and see if I can steal ‘em for a price I can’t refuse and build a little bopper to knock around on. If I don’t like it, it can always help hold up my garage.