You probably have that one project. It’s a little stupid, a little outlandish. It wouldn’t fit into your real work, unless… you changed your work. Bill Webb is a partner at Huge Design, and he rides motorcycles. With a tech-heavy background in product design, Bill had always thought of designing a custom motorcycle but never had an excuse to try. It took some bad luck and a deep appreciation for bike design to make it happen.
After selling off all his motorcycle gear to start Huge four years ago, a friend gifted him a tired old Kawasaki zx7 Ninja. Despite its slightly regrettable “purple David Bowie" graphics, he rode the bike daily… until it was stolen. They recovered it from a San Francisco tow yard, parted out and bedraggled, and began thinking about what to do with it. Two years later, the bike has a completely different—and very distinct—personality, reinvented by its industrial designer owner. The resulting design is a stylistic blend of two very different aesthetic schools, pulling elements from both cafe racers and streetfighters together in a slick, stripped down package. To unpack the complex project Bill walked us through his inspiration, design and build process.
Words and images courtesy of Bill Webb
Design Vision
To combine elements from two very different styles of custom bikes (cafe racer and streetfighter) and create the CAFE FIGHTER. Cafe racers have been the hottest trend in the custom motorcycle scene for the last few years. The cafe racer usually starts with a Japanese street bike from the mid-70′s. Unnecessary parts are stripped off and usually the seat/subframe area is heavily modified into a very minimal, flat single seat. Because the bikes are 30+ years old, there is very little technology to deal with and the bikes pretty much design themselves once all the factory parts are removed. The CB750 is probably the most used-donor bike to create this look. This style is pretty popular with hipsters and city riders who value the raw urban vibe of these bikes.
Street fighters by contrast are usually modern sport bikes that have been spun into aggressive-styled mean machines with wild graphics, neon lights and loud colors. Usually the streetfighter starts with a modern sport bike that has been stripped of its racing plastics. Without the plastics, these bikes can look a bit raw with random bits of electronics and plumbing exposed that were never intended to be seen. These bikes celebrate the ugliness and own it as an aggressive, mean aesthetic that the owners take pride in.
Our goal was simple: apply the honesty and proportional beauty of the cafe racer with the raw aggression and performance stance of a modern sportbike/streetfighter…and call it a Cafe-fighter.
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