[engine roars]
Hi, I'm Rick and I build bikes in London under the name Dirty Dick's Motos,
and this is the fifth bike I've built and the latest one. It is a Kawasaki W650, so if you think it looks like a Triumph
you'd be close. In the 60s Kawasaki bought a brand called Maguro who had licensed the BSA
A7 from BSA to build in Japan. Became an instant hit in Japan. It was built as a W1 and then a W2.
So, about 21 years ago Kawasaki relaunched that 60s W1 model as this, the Kawasaki W650. A standard bike
much in the vein of the 60s Brit bikes. And, you know, I've loved them and the design is fantastic.
Better engineering, no leaks, fairly light for the size.
But overall just a really lovely bike to ride. So for this bike I wanted to do something a little bit special.
I've always loved the the 60s Desert Sleds in California, the whole Steve McQueen and Bud Ekins
vibe. And I thought, you know, we've got a great base in this classic shape. So let's take a W650,
let's take it apart, and put it back together in the style of the 60s Desert Sleds.
[engine roars]
So if you're familiar with Ducati engines, Ducati used to
build engines that used a bevel drive to run the camshaft. That's instead of, as they'd use belts now,
and most other bikes use chains, and I was trolling the internet looking for something interesting
and I came across these Kawasaki's that used a bevel drive. You can see the bevel drive down here.
That runs the camshaft from the crank. I'd never seen another engine like this
before apart from 70s Ducati, so it immediately piqued my interest. Hopped on a train up to
Manchester, gave a man 2700 pounds cash and rode one home. And that was my first W650.
It very quickly got sold and rebuilt from the ground up into something completely different.
And about a year later I got offered another two W650s for the princely sum of 5000 pounds for both.
Neither were running, but both were in very good condition, at least on the surface. So I fixed the
one, rode it to Scotland, down to Cornwall, rode it to the Isle of Man for the TT, then back to
London. And that's now become my daily rider and a test mule for the parts and interesting
things I try on these bikes. And this Desert Sled was the other one. It looked nice, but it had been
painted with a paintbrush, and it was essentially pretty rotten underneath. So as I started taking it
apart bits of rust fell out, I had some seized bearings. And I thought, you know, instead of
trying to fix it up and move it on, let me take this last bike and let's start from scratch.
This is the third one I've owned and so far it's my favorite. These bikes are
so wonderful to work on, easy to use, and just great all round motorcycles.
[engine roars]
The reason I keep coming back to these W650s as the basis for building bikes is quite
simple. There's a few reasons but for me, first and foremost, it's the beautiful engine. It's instantly
recognisable, it's polished, it's clean, and that form is followed through the rest of the bike.
That cleanness, the simplicity of it. You've got twin shocks at the back. You've got right
side up forks at the front. You've got a twin cradle frame for the engine. And these are all
standard basics from the 50s onwards. And they allow you to flow into anything from a Bobber,
a Scrambler, or in this case a Desert Sled, or if you want to build a Cafe Racer.
[engine sounds]
Although these engines are 650cc, if you look at the engine parts you can see there was
actually a pattern Kawasaki was going to follow and slowly increase the bore. So the newer engines
are actually 773cc, but you can push them up to 850cc, which is great if you want a fast Kawasaki.
But to be honest you don't really need that much in such a small and light bike.
650 is perfect. All you need to do, let it breathe, new exhaust, maybe some carbs, and you're good to go.
[engine roars]
The quintessential exhaust for a Desert Sled is the high level shotgun pipes. You've seen many
like this, and it was really the only choice for this bike. So my friend Dave at P&D knocked me
up a set of stainless polished shotgun pipes, and I used an inch and three quarter brass tip from
a Harley for these pipes. We made the pipes out of stainless steel, as a decision. As you can see when
stainless steel gets hot it turns to gold. Gives it that nice yellowing color which blends in with
the yellowy warmth of the nickel-plated frame. So I thought that was a nice touch,
and blends in nicely with the colours of the bike. Some of the most beautiful 60s Scramblers,
British Scramblers, have nickel-plated frames. Specifically the Rickman Metisse bikes.
And although the 60s Desert Sleds weren't known for nickel-plated frames,
I think the most beautiful scramblers have nickel-plated frames so
it had to be done. I also wanted to do a little special touch of my own, and added an integrated
luggage rack into the back of the bike. So you can see your eye follows the line of the frame
to this top hoop, and then it's matched with this hoop here. It's not a huge deal, but for my eyes
I wanted that symmetry. I wanted it to have clean lines everywhere you look on the bike. And this is
followed as well into the swing arm where you can see the machined triangles out here almost mimic
the triangle formed by the frame, the rear shock, and the swing arm itself. So a little detail but
I quite like that. The swing arm was machined and hand welded by a guy I know in Thailand who did me
a favour. It wasn't something I was originally looking to do. As soon as I saw that it could
be done I thought yes, this will be a nice little extra detail on the bike that we can
put on. The swing arm is a little bit lighter and stiffer as you'd expect from the steel OEM item.
[engine roars]
The shocks themselves, these are a custom build from Hagon for me. They're adjustable
and an extra inch longer to raise the bum of the bike one inch higher for a bit more ground
clearance. If I was going to criticise the W650 for anything, it would be a front end that could be
better. Suspension and brakes are not great. So for this build I wanted to really see how far I could
push it, how good we could make the front end, and see if we can get a really great stopping, handling,
turning motorcycle out of this W650. So the first thing I wanted to sort out in the front end
was the suspension. Standard forks are quite dire, just linear springs and dampers and that's it. So
first thing to get was a cartridge kit from Andreani. Had the top caps anodised to match the
rest of the bike, because they were this gordy gold, now they're a nice silver. And this gives rebound
and damping compression adjustment. Next thing to do was some custom machined top triples with a two
inch drop, lifts the bike up in the front nicely to match the rear, gives us a bit of ground clearance.
And then with the integrated speedo housing for the Moto Gadget clock.
All comes together very nicely. The headlight is from Motodemic. This
took quite a while to find actually, not because it's particularly difficult or special to find,
but I wanted the exact shape. I wanted that perfect egg cup shape for the headlight.
And Motodemic do such a nice one as you can see. We've got some aluminium headlight brackets,
some Motone indicators, and a nice bracket to give us a lifted front mud guard for a nice Sled look.
[engine roars]
When it came to the brakes I wanted to do something special. Another part that the W650
is known for is poor brakes. So I approached a few custom brake caliper manufacturers
and after lots of prototyping, and lots of running around, I settled on a Harrison six piston bullet
caliper. You can see here, this was specially made for me with these fins, and custom offsets to suit
the custom made floating disc up front as well. Because the bike uses spoked wheels, any standard
calipers would have clearance issues, so we had to do a lot of custom machining and prototyping.
I've since put these together into a kit which I'm reselling to cover the costs, which is working out
quite well. To match the six piston caliper, I've used a custom tech 14mm brake master cylinder, with
fins on top. There's a bit of congruence between the parts.
[engine roars]
One of my favourite things about the W650
is that they kept the kickstarter. There's no reason to have one, other than it's a throwback to
an old-school way of doing things. So I wanted to highlight this on the bike, and managed to find
a company in Japan that sells these kickstart levers with the brass finishing pedal on it. I
thought that would be a great way to highlight a really old-school anachronistic part of the bike.
In keeping with the Desert Sled theme, I've added an engine protector and some engine
bars to give it a more rock proof and sturdy look. One of the nicest things about the W650
is the traditional tank shape, this teardrop tank. You wouldn't notice how narrow the tank is because
as standard they come with huge badges on the side and massive knee pads. So I removed those,
and had my friends at P&D Customs weld in a seam underneath here, and across the top of the tank
to remove that pressed steel seam that you see. It is more prominent on modern Triumphs, you see
it there a lot. But it's also quite obvious on the Kawasaki W650s. By welding that
seam in it gives you the cleanest shape of that tank. There's no seam to draw the eye away from
the shape of the tank. And also had them relocate the filler cap to the right hand side, and mount
it flush into the tank. By doing this I don't think we could get a cleaner tank. The lines
are just so smooth and slim as it comes down to this wasp-like waist where it meets the seat.
[engine roars]
I do get asked reasonably often about where I got these handlebars. These are actually
Harley-Davidson bars. I cannot tell you what model, something old. And I actually chopped
off two inches to make them a bit narrower, so you can imagine how wide they were before I cut them. I
love this style of bar. It's known as a Western bar.
It really is a bit reminiscent of, sort of a 60s kind of Beach bar or Scrambler vibe.
One of my favorite British companies is a bunch of guys
called Motone who make a lot of parts for Triumphs. So I use them for the indicators, billet aluminium
indicators, and the billet tail light. As you can see they make lovely pieces for custom bikes. When
it came to the seat I wanted to keep it simple so the seat is made of leather and alcantara, which
is fancy to match the rest of the bike. But it's a single seater and most importantly it still works
with the factory seat latch. So you can still pop the seat on and off as if it was a standard bike.
[engine roars]
You may have noticed the rather chunky wheels on the bike. So we're running 19 inch up front, 18 at
the back. Same as standard, but these are much wider rims. We've got three inch wide in the front and
four and a quarter inches the back. One size tire wider at the front and one size wider at the back.
So although I've gone much wider on the rims, I've kept the tires only marginally wider so as not to
affect the handling too much by putting fat wheels on it. But by having much wider rims you do have
a really good look to the bike. It does look a lot more purposeful and aggressive. The choice of tyres,
that's come and gone and gone around again and backwards and forwards, but eventually I settled
on these TKC 80s. They're a good performing tyre, but most importantly they look period
correct. They look like they came out the 60s or the 70s and they really set the bike off nicely.
[engine roars]
So from start to finish, from the day I picked up the range and started dismantling this bike, to
the day it was running again, it's probably just over 12 months. With a lot of breaks in between,
delays with suppliers, changes and so on. But I would say you could do this in about 12 months,
if you're working out of a shed on your own like me.
[engine roars]
The bike is fantastic to ride with the plush suspension, the wide bars,
the good brakes, and the shotgun pipes. It handles nicely, it stops, it goes,
and it's an experience. It feels like you're riding a bike from another era.
[engine roars]
When you're building a bike from the ground up, literally from nuts and bolts, there's a lot of
romanticism about it, you know. You're assembling a giant Lego kit, or it's just a big puzzle you have
to put together. But the truth is you're putting together a puzzle of about a thousand parts,
and you only need 500 of them. You end up with many extras, there's development time, any special
machining needs doing, and chances are you'll have to do it two or three times before it's correct.
Building a bike like this does come with a few challenges, and I think the biggest for me was
the project management of it all. When you have about 15 different suppliers for parts,
you need to manage timelines, and you need to manage 15 different parts suppliers. Quality
checking everything, making sure this part fits with that part from two different suppliers, or
in the in this case maybe 15 - 20 different suppliers. And it becomes quite a process to
keep track of everything. The advice I'd give to someone who is going to do something like
this is just to take it one part at a time, one piece at a time. If you look at the bike
on a whole as a project it becomes overwhelming. So if you focus on getting one part right at a time
very soon you'll have five parts that are correct and soon after that you'll have a bike.