Myself and my buddy’s about 8 of us kicked around some ideas to get to this point, working around my vision I’ve had since 2000 and made it a reality. I picked up the 1978 xs in April of 2009 for 425.00, which needless to say was in sad shape, it had been living outside under a tarp on the street in Oregon for a number of years so, every thing was rusty, rotten, and just ugly.
My buddy Ken and I had to w-d 40 the rotors just to push it up the ramp into the truck, this was after some long negotiations with the owner who had visions of what it used to be, the price started out at 1050.00 a little high.
By the next day we had it running to find out what the compression was and it wasn’t good 90 lbs and 120 lbs so out the motor came. And by the next week I was tearing it apart like a nut with a dead line which was a big task to have it road worthy by May 29th well that date got pushed out.
Tore it down to the frame and sat it up on the mock up table and invited any of the buddy’s over who where willing to dream along with me to sit stare drink coffee and bounce around ideas, one of the fellas Rich was very helpful in his willingness to kick it and entertain me on my first chop build, I’ve monkeyed around with bikes since the mid 70s but it had been about 18 years since my last obsession. Picked up the hard tail from TC bros NICE work it went together just like they said. And kept my buddy’s busy painting, cleaning, and polishing while I put the motor together, and mocked up parts. And if the dead line was,t enough I wanted to use as much of the original parts as possible so to get this together was a large under take-in getting the parts to work in a pleasing matter, but I am pleased with the finished bike.
As far as the motor goes its a stock 78 with electronic boyer ignition, and Mikes xs filters with H-D sporty mufflers. I did freshen the top end up,with new gaskets and a lot of cleaning,and polishing of the aluminum.
The sporty tank was picked up at the local swap meet as well as the mufflers for 70.00 bucks then the paint was laid out by my buddy Kevin who did a wonderful job. All the life or death wielding was done by my buddy Marty who also did some nice work. Then assembly was mostly lots of head scratching and time lots of it and this is what we came up with a 78 xs chop that runs great, with a 30t rear sprocket, looks pleasing and yes draws lots of looks and passerby’s taken photos of my bike, with the exception of a Gresham police officer who didn’t like my license plate or my turn signals, so some alterations have been made to please the court and avoid 310.00 dollars of tickets, this was hard to get my head around and still not really likening the some polluted look of the bobber, oh yea I was riding it by July so plenty of summer fun was had. I could have built it all myself but it was so much fun with the help of my friends, besides the fellas are always rollin with me where ever I go, way cool. And the original owner did see the finished ride and as I told him he rode it and wants me to build him one using his Norton, coool.
Now dreaming of the sugar plums and my next build a street able speedway bike using a 80 suzuki gn 400 which by the way is crazy hard to get parts for, never the less I like the motor.
And yes thinkin about my next xs goto love it.
Ken Bourgo
