Moto Build – Always Thinking

Lately I have been thinking a lot about motorcycles, I have been riding my KTM to work each day and enjoying the freedom of being out on the road on my bike.

While I cruise along with the small 250 engine beneath me I think about the upgrades I want to make to the new 450 build, the key to making a small engine fast would be to first make it as light as possible. I have searched the world for inspiration and am getting a few key areas of the build finished.

The rear wheel was one of those tricky areas, I needed to make an axle, spacers, sprocket and adapter that gets rid of the cush drive setup that was in built in the BBS Magnesium wheel. The new axle is made from chromoly tube, the new spacers are from alloy bar stock the axle slips through the swing arm ends which will have no wheel adjustment. This means I will make a small DH MTB type chain roller to get the tension right.

The sprocket is a 520 KTM alloy item, bolted to a custom 10mm offset adapter that I had to tap into the BBS magnesium wheel, this deletes the cush drive and keeps things as simple as possible, after all thats what I am after.

This is the Yoshimura race bike these wheels are off, as you can see theres some insane parts happening around this wheel set on the race bike, my aim is to make the rims the hero and then tie everything else into them as neatly as possible.

After selling the Ohlins front shocks with Brembo Monoblock callipers I thought long and hard as to which front forks to use. It drove me insane for weeks, I didn’t need something that was built for an 1198 Ducati, I didn’t want something that was off a 1970 motorcycle, the more I looked and looked I kept heading in the path of small dirt bikes, I want the weight to be somewhere in the 80-90kg range, thats super light in any ones language and all I needed was a decent fork that would be strong enough and look good enough for my application.

I absolutely love these, the finish on the fork legs is just perfect, it will also tie in with my rear suspension but you will see that later on in the build.

Ill need to do some machining on the front wheel and make a disk adapter and calliper mount, just a few more changes before I can get into the tube chassis work. Thats the bit I’m looking forward to the most!