Just received a new bike when I logged in world today. Of course by ZZ Bottom. I mean who else would send me multiple vehicles multiple times each week? And I’m really sorry to admit I mostly don’t even unpack them but stuff all the fancy boats, cars, planes and bikes in my inventory. Of course I have a plan to unpack all of them, one day when I find the time, and photograph them all and make a blogstory about it. But for now I only look at stuff that “jumps at me”.

And when I read that today, one of at least 10 items was a HD Café Racer … well, I was triggered right away. Explainification: HD stands for Harley-Davidson, the original all-American bike manufacture out of Milwaukee.

In contrast to that the café racer culture is a pure British thing. Tune your British parallel twin engine and race it around the block. Start and Finish was often enough a café, frequented by biker gangs and easy to impress girls. I guess it’s where the saying “Hold my coffee while I …” originated from. 😉

Weapons of choice where mostly Triumph, BSA and Norton motorcycles, customized for extreme lightness and spunk.

Anyway, I guess up to a couple  years ago nobody ever thought Americans would catch up on that “culture”. The heavy displacement, fully dressed bikes by Harley and Indian where made for comfortable riding on the highways, not for hooliganish spurting thru inner city traffic.

But since the world sometimes is a cool place, Europeans started buying and enjoying Harleys and Americans discovered Japanese and European bike manufacturers. And some awesome customizers are even putting heavy Harley engines in light, racey frames and made a new sort of Café Racers.

And such a thing I got today, and will show it now: