There’s just something so darn nice about a bitsa bobber that looks cool, doesn’t cost a fortune, and makes you want to take it for a spin just to se what it’s like. One way or the other, it’s gotta be an experience that you just won’t get off a any dealer’s showroom floor. It could be good, bad or indifferent, but it will not be the sanitized experience we expect from a new bike. And, that is exactly what we present to you here, a very cool hot rod Sportster with a whole new lease on life.

   Now I don’t think it’s presumptuous to assume that this 1979 AMF-era Sportster that was the basis for this bike was just an old Ironhead that somehow made it through the past 37-years. Yeah, it was probably in not too great a shape with a dozen different names on the title, but a perfect specimen of a donor bike. The most critical pieces, the frame and 61-cube engine were intact, but in need of some love which they obviously got. It wouldn’t surprise me either if when they got through re-building it with all the fixes now available for AMF stuff that it is better than it ever was even new.

  I know it looks better than they ever did or maybe it’s just all the lovely brass bits that bring a little mechanical warmth to the mix of metals. The acorn nuts on the head, the push rod tubes, the velocity stack on the S&S Super E carb, and the inspection caps on the always a knockout to me AMF primary give a nice continuity throughout the engine. Through in the brass kicker and the BMX-style bear trap pegs and you’ve got a winner. The long header-wrap headers travel straight aft until the rear wheel where they arc upwards at a jaunty angle and the sound emitted is a deeper, mellower tone just right for hot rodding around town.

  The frame was treated to a nice hard-tailing, a very clean job, that also allowed them to run a much beefier rear tire, laced to a 16-inch red powdercoated rim. A single brake on the rear wheel provides the stopping power as the front 23-inch wheel is brakeless, but very cute with its red hub. The whole kit and caboodle is corralled by the tasty black springer with eye-catching copper springs and a headlight sticking out like it was being held ahead by hand. All very cool stuff done very well in my opinion with a keen eye to getting the most out of a custom buck through imagination. 

   The rest of the stuff is exactly what I would have hoped for from the iconic Sporty tank with an outside fuel levels to the chrome cylindrical oil tank mounted right next to an external oil filer setup under the sprung solo saddle with a buckskin leather covering to the flat trailer-style fender out back. Oh, I almost forgot the wide, forward-tilting apes with lovely knurled brass controls, grips and mirror and it’s up to the paintjob to do the rest of this attitude reset on the formerly tired old hulk.

   You can’t go wrong with black. Even though it might not seem overly imaginative to some, black bikes are what a lot of us dream about. Someone did a really nice paintjob with something that’s not too easy to pull off correctly –flat or matte or satin or whatever you want to call it paint. Here, it’s done flawlessly with some extremely tasteful graphics that is as interesting to me as a bazillion dollar paintjob. Whoever built this showed a lot of good taste and more importantly, restraint. This bike is a neat hot rod Sporty and the mystery owner/builder(s) deserves two thumbs up for a great presentation of a bike we’d all love to get a chance to at least take around the block once just for the experience. It just looks like hot rod fun that didn’t cost a ton and you can’t ask for much more than that.