And because too much chrome is barely enough, chrome discs and calipers were bolted on and touches of brass were added, too. Next, the drive belt was converted to a chain, the speedo was relocated to the engine’s left-hand side, and the wiring was neatly hidden. So all the nuts and bolts were chromed, the factory lights were replaced with mini LED’s where required and the switches were replaced with smaller, tidier items. In addition to the must haves, Bruce wanted to take the bike to another level. “The absolute musts in creating a 70’s style bike are the springer front forks, the “Jack & Jill” seat, a sissy bar and a bunch of flames on the tank,” says Bruce. The key aim for the job was to have reliability and the comfy ride of a modern bike but with the look of those classic 70’s-style chopper customs. The client wanted the bike to have a lot of chrome with touches of gold, and so a Seventy-Two Sportster (aka the “XL1200V”) was chosen as the starting point due to the abundance of chrome already installed from the Hog factory somewhere deep in the US blue collar heartland. With that said, we continually updated Tony during the build process so he was aware when we experienced challenges, but thankfully he was completely understanding.”
“Tony fully understood that custom builds take time and so we did not set a timeline it was more of an “it’ll be done when it’s done” approach. Then they acquired the right bike for the project and the build began in earnest. Next came a budget, which was agreed upon. So Bruce sat down with Tony and put together a list of exactly what he wanted. “So we sorted out his bike and when he came in to collect it, he saw a Harley Sportster chopper we had built for another customer and he decided that he wanted a new bike with something similar and in a classic, ‘70s style. “The job came about when a new customer, Tony, wandered into the shop with a custom chopper he had bought at auction asking us to get it running properly,” continues Bruce. “The search for the right space took a lot longer than we anticipated and so did coming up with a name for the shop, however we managed to find both and Zen Motorcycles was opened in March 2022 in Sydney’s Alexandria. “The idea for Zen Motorcycles was to have a shop that could build custom bikes for customers, service bikes to the high standards that our customers expected and also become a retailer of electric motorcycles,” says Zen’s Bruce Crerar. When you look up “chopper” in the encyclopedia… Right on cue and as if to prove a point, here comes Sydney’s Zen Motorcycles and their chopped 2015 Harley Davidson Sportster Seventy-Two. And right now it almost seems as if choppers are on the ascendancy and it does really look like cafe racers have run their course for the time being. They were just too entrenched and – let’s face it – too damn cool to die just yet, so they continued on doing what they do so well. Of course, the older and wiser of us knew that in some form or another choppers would always be around. All things rightly or wrongly assigned to history’s trash bin. Flares, beehive hair-dos and chest hair…and choppers. Representing the exact opposite of the light, fast and above all European essence of cafe racers, it was all too easy to judge them as yesterday’s news and maybe even write them off all together. Back in the Noughties, when cafe racers were all the rage and the global custom scene went through a renaissance of sorts, it was easy to see choppers as a dinosaur-style of bike.
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