Met an interesting young chap named Dave yesterday who's literally just finished his chopper and is on his way to the bike show in New Plymouth for the weekend. Unfortunately, I can't upload images from my phone for some reason but let me assure you, this bike (don't know if it has a name) is fairly unique to NZ.
Firstly, there's not a a whole lot of "off the shelf" parts on it. Over the past two years, Dave has hand made everything including the frame, tank, springer front end, bars the works. The bike looks like an unfinished, "dummy assembled" bike awiting paint but is in fact fully running and ready to ride.
The bars look like a couple of bits of steel pipe. No levers or switch blocks. Closer inspection shows the r/h bar end twists, fully internal throttle mechanism and cable. The frame, seat, bars, front end and tank are unpainted. The 30 cm long, unslienced header pipes are hand made and invlove over 45 welded sections. He reckons 200 hours to build the front end along.
Dave's aggreed to kindly let us display his bike for a bit when he gets back from the show so I'll post some pics.
Really, it's very cool to see a proper bike fabricator right here in Wellington and a tallented one at that.
Good luck for the show Dave.
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