A few months ago I suggested a couple of US fellow builders looking for new ideas to think about a Café racer Rolling chassis or Kit. And here we go. A French company called “Jewel Racer” (I didn’t know them until now) just released a Café Racer Kit to turn a Harley XR1200 into a CR. And the beauty of this kit is not only its look but the fact that’s it’s a pure bolt-on system (tank, fairing, seat) without any modification to your XR 1200, that you can install in 30 minutes. This kit (fellow builder Bertrand Dubet is the model maker) will be displayed next week at the Custom Chrome Europe Dealer Show in Mainz, Germany March 29th. Pre-order by contacting Jewel Racer at: jewel-racer@orange.fr.
New And Interesting. Cafe Racer Kit.
Published by March 23rd, 2009 in Builders, Chassis, Customs and Editorial.6 Responses to “New And Interesting. Cafe Racer Kit.”
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Cafe Racers are back.
SWEET! saw at least 3 XR1200’s buzzing the streets in Daytona. peace
France has to screw with Harleys because they don’t have a bike of their own
Rodent, they do, it’s called Voxan. Heres a link to their website:
http://www.voxan.com/voxan/entreprise.asp
C’mon Rodent, I guess you’ve read enough about the Harley history to know that you would have never been able to ride or even see a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in your whole life, if William S. Harley and the Davidson brothers didn’t have plans of the French De Dion Bouton engine to copy back then, when they built their first prototype.
France has a long tradition with motorcycles, as there were about 400 different brands built in this country between the early 20th century and the late 1950’s. Of course, most of these brands were small scale companies building handmade bikes (even a few fantastic V-Twins), and all of them went down. Almost.
Maybe one day some wise guy will say that the Americans are screwing around with Asian cars because they don’t have a car industry of their own. Not any longer at least. I hope this day will never arrive, but if it does, I’ll be smart enough not to be this wise guy !
This topic being rather about the Cafe Racer kit that on the French motorcycle industry (or the lack of it), I wanted to add a few words on this specific bike. I saw it last week-end during the Custom Chrome Europe show in Mainz / Germany and it really looks great. The best part of it is that you could easily switch from your stock XR1200 look to the Cafe Racer look and then put it back into stock configuration if you want to. No welding or cutting is necessary, just a very basic bolt on job requiring no special tools or skills. As far as I remember, it’s the first time I see such a simple kit which changes the look of a stock Harley in such a radical way. Let’s be honest, the bike isn’t a replica of the 1977-78 XLCR, but could rather be considered as a modern version of this legendary model. But for sure, the XRCR (I just invented this name) based on the XR1200, is closer to the real XLCR than the stock version of this 1200 is to the genuine XR750. And according to H-D, it’s supposed to have some XR750 ADN ! Now it could rather have lots of cafeine in the tank !