ASTERISK AVANZARE Now that’s a Sportster

world class customs

japan

There are custom Sport- sters…and then there’s this. It may have started life as an ordinary 2001 XLH883, but by the time Hideki Hoshikawa of * Asterisk Avanzare Now, that’s a Sportster By David Edwards Japan’s Asterisk Custom Cycles was done, it was barely recognizable, transformed into maybe the most impressive custom of 2012. Hey, don’t just take my word for it. Roland Sands, head of RSD, is at the pointy end of the neo-custom movement, an award-winning bike builder in his own right and a bigtime parts supplier. As such he gets invitations from all over the world to guest judge at bike shows, which is how last April he found himself in Nagoya, Japan at the Joints Custom Bike Show, staring gobsmacked at Hoshikawa’s Sport- ster – fittingly named “Avanzare,” Italian for “advance, make prog- ress, go forward.” “I have to add Hideki as one of my favorite builders,” Sands said.

“Every part of Avanzare has been massaged ’til the only thing stock left on the bike is…nothing, really.”

“Avanzare is really pushing the envelope of high-performance customs. The amount of work that went into the bike was incredible and I had to stop and really pay attention to see the level of detail he put into every piece. Not only was it filled with topnotch products, but every part of the bike had been massaged ’til the only thing stock left on the bike was…I don’t know. Nothing really, except maybe the pushrod tubes.”

Sands gave the bike his top award that day and later heaped praise on Avanzare on the RSD blog.

Hoshikawa’s previous builds – mostly traditionally customized Shovelheads – were sparse and clean but gave no clue as to the magic that was about to come. Born in 1976, Hideki just celebrated his 37 th birthday, was educated at the Tsuruoka National College of Technology and joined the workforce as a motorcycle mechanic when he was 20. He has run Asterisk Custom Cycles since 2004. It is a small shop in Natori-shi in the Miyagi prefecture, just himself, another mechanic and his wife, who does the accounting. “Other than paint and complicated billet machining, we do everything in-house,” he says.

The Avanzare project started when a customer came into the shop wanting a traditional Harley-Davidson café-racer, maybe an updated take on the 1970s XLCR, an idea that did not excite Hoshikawa. “I was not interested in mimicking an old café-racer,” he explains. “I wanted to produce a modern café-racer.” Persuaded, the customer bought in and entrusted the complete build to Asterisk.

First job was to lop off the frame’s seat rails and unbolt the stock twin-shock swingarm. A student of motorsport, Hoshikawa wanted a ProLink monoshock setup inspired by Honda’s 1984 NSR500 GP racebike. He welded up the main section of the swingarm himself, using 7N01 aluminum, with the billet axle carriers and front bridge farmed out to a local CNC shop. An Ohlins shock in place and lever ratios worked out, the desired effect on frame geometry

*Asterisk Avanzare

“I was not interested in mimick- ing an old café-racer --- I wanted to produce a modern café-racer.”

was accomplished. “With the whole mainframe inclined forward, we had the steering-head angle of a racer – 24 degrees instead of 29,” he says.

Now what was needed was the front end of a racebike, so out went another call to Ohlins. With the jacked-up frame, though, the forks’ trail needed to be worked out. “I took a hand-drawn sketch of the tri- ple-trees to a design architect friend, who turned that into a 3D drawing,” says Hoshikawa, who then made another trip to his trusted CNC man. Drill bits whirled, alloy chips flew and the result could just as easily be hanging on a wall somewhere as industrial art.

For power, Hoshikawa went to the H-D Screamin’ Eagle cata- log for a 1200 big-bore kit. He experimented with combustion chamber shape to work around Japan’s low-octane gasoline and ended up lowering compression ratio, but the motor is still pretty stout. “It makes around 100 hp,” he says.

Part of that power production has to come from the snaking, artfully crafted 2-into-1 exhaust system, more of Hoshikawa’s handiwork, its stainless-steel left bare, its multiple welds proudly on the display, easily one of the bike’s signature compo- nents.

The desire for a tight, waspwaisted chassis put the nix on a conventional midships-mounted oil bag. Instead, Hoshikawa came up with an oversize cow-catcher of an aluminum chin tank to con- tain lubricant, its concave leading surfaces ribbed for added strength. There were side benefits to the tank’s down-low placement: “We ended up with greater cooling efficiency and a lower center of gravity,” he says.

Hoshikawa fired up his welder again to create the aluminum rear subframe, its job to locate the seat structure, a small catch tank for the top-end oil breathers and a mounting point for the Pro Circuit dirtbikestyle muffler. The tailsection body- work was formed from sheet alumi- num. The gas tank is steel, vaguely

*Asterisk Avanzare

PHOTO BY JIM GIANATSIS/FASTDATES.COM

n(Above) What a country! Builder Hideki Hoshikawa crated up Avanzare and airmailed the bike and himself to Los Angeles just in time the big L.A. Calendar Show, where it won Best of Show and was presented with AFT’s Visionary Award. A couple of days later Hoshikawa found himself in the FastDates.com photo studio for a calendar shoot. Here he’s bearing up nicely under the strain. (Left) One of the few parts not built in-house by Asterisk was the bike’s CNC’d triple-clamp assembly.

“With the swingarm in place and the whole mainframe inclined forward, we had steering geometry of a racer --- 24 degrees instead of 29.”

Sportster-like in shape but as if left unattended on a radiator too long and with the back half so severely pinched that at its end it’s barely wider than the frame backbone.

I compliment Hideki on the simple, standout styling of Avanzare’s tinware and wonder from where he drew inspiration. In his halting English, he replies, “It became this form when I found a design without waste.”

It’s too bad Hoshikawa didn’t meet Roland Sands before the Joints show – an industry discount from RSD parent company Performance Machine would have come in handy. Avanzare seemingly has one of everything from the PM goodies list, starting most noticeably with a pair of 18-inch blue-anodized contrastcut wheels, wrapped with sporty Michelin radials. Also from PM are the meaty radial-mount calipers all ’round, brake rotors on matching blue-ano carriers, front and rear master cylinders and handlebar controls.

With the exception of a lightweight battery that has given problems, there isn’t a thing Hoshikawa says he would change about the bike, and it’s hard to argue with that. This is a blockbuster motorcycle that is equal parts style

*Asterisk Avanzare

Hideki looks back to go forward: “I have respect for all the old engineers and devote every day to producing new things.”

and substance, as much steak as sizzle, without doubt one of the most memorable customs of the past decade.

I ask Hideki what he likes most about Avanzare, and here my non-existent Japanese and his broken English fails us.

“There is a reason for beautiful form,” he says. “And speed becomes the ultimate form.”

Come to think of it, that sums the bike up perfectly, no further translation needed.

*Asterisk Avanzare

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SMOOTH OPERATOR

Rough Crafts goes Guerilla on a Big Twin

By Chris Hunter

Idon’t know about you, but I always mag ne the typical Harley builder commuting to his shop on a heavily modified Panhead. With perhaps a Ford F-150 in reserve for shifting bikes and reality TV crews around.

Winston Yeh, founder of Rough Crafts (www.rough crafts.com) and one of the current custom Harley designers du jour, rides a tiny PGO 125cc scooter to work. And he’s not ashamed to admit it.

There are other things to note about Yeh. He builds furniture. His background is graphic design and graffiti – he’s created artworks for big brands, including the

TAIWAN

fashion designer Agnès b. And he lives and works in Taiwan, the tiny island state off the coast of China. It’s barely bigger than Maryland, but today Taiwan is one of the 20 largest economies in the world.

From the outside, Yeh’s rise to fame seems meteoric. Since 2010, the Rough Crafts “Guerilla” series of bikes have taken Harley’s Dark Custom look and given it a menacing, militaristic twist. “Shattered Pearl” was a lighter counterpoint, a clean, sleek take on the Harley Forty-Eight. Next came a gothic, steampunk-influenced S&S-powered Knuckle based on Zero Engineering’s Type 6 frame (see “Portfolio: A Rough Crafts Retrospec

n(Above) Shadow Rocket features immaculate detailing. The air cleaner and exhaust system are proprietary Rough Crafts designs. (Below) Yeh flits effortlessly between graphic design, graffiti art and bike building.

tive” sidebar). His latest build is shown here, a 2002-model FLSTF Fat Boy called “Shadow Rocket.” At its debut at the big Mooneyes show in Japan this past December, it picked up a brace of awards, including Best in Show.

As with most overnight successes, Yeh’s was a long time in the making. Now 32, he describes his childhood as nerdy. “My father was an engineer who specialized in production design, so when every other 7-year-old boy got their Lego pirate ship or police station, I got the Technic series – with all kinds of gears and mechanisms. That’s probably one reason why I love what I do now.” He became interested in motorcycles during his first year at college. “A classmate bought a 150cc Yamaha and he looked so cool, I got one myself,” he says. Yeh stripped his bike in the college workshop – he was majoring in industrial design – started working, and has never stopped. It’s only recently, though, that he’s been able to make a living from custom work, because the scene in Taiwan is a long way behind Japan, Europe and the USA. The market is small, and heavily regulated. Until a few years ago, it was illegal to import a bike of more than 250cc. Bikes more than five years old have to pass a yearly inspection, and part of that check is a visual reference to the stock machine. Which means that you can modify the engine internals as much as you like but a change of handlebar might trigger alarm bells.

Even if you buy a new bike to modify, there are barriers. The Taiwanese import tax on foreign motorcycles is extremely high, effectively doubling the price of a bike, so even the most basic Harleys are a luxury. “Younger people love customs, but most can only afford a Sportster – if they’re lucky,” says Yeh. “And older riders focus more on comfort, so they’re not really into the custom scene.”

Yeh’s approach is to work with these restrictions, rather than against them. “I study the lines of the stock frame,” he says, “then figure out what I can chop and what I can’t. It’s interesting to see people’s reactions when they realize that my custom bike is actually based on the same machine they have at home – but enhanced in every possible way.”

Japanese and Western motorcycle magazines are readily available in Taiwan, and Internet access is easy. When inspiration strikes for Yeh, top-notch local fabrication skills come into play. “If you need any kind of machining, laser cutting, CNC or tube bending, there’ll be a shop no more than an hour’s drive away. So it’s easy to ‘make’ stuff without having to buy all the equipment,” he says. (Ironically, when Yeh sources obscure custom parts from the U.S., he sometimes finds that they were originally made in Taiwan!)

Every successful entrepreneur has a “tipping point,” a moment when the stars align and the afterburners kick in. In Yeh’s case, that opportunity came during a trip to California in 2005. He was on a scholarship from the Taiwanese government, studying at the Art Center College

of Design in Pasadena, when he bumped into one of America’s most influential custom bike builders.

“By a weird chance, I met Roland Sands, and ended up working at RSD. I saw how passion can turn into a business, and I thought, ‘I can do that too’,” Yeh recalls. Hanging around Sands and seeing how RSD’s parent company Performance Machine operated revealed the tricks of production-based design and the product development process.

Says Sands, “I was looking for someone to do a big graffiti piece at my shop. I had Winston sketch something up; it was very cool. I saw he was talented and I needed some graphic design work done, so I brought him on for a little while. His Guerilla look has an off-road militia vibe, like a two-wheeled dune buggy. I do like it. It’s impressive, especially considering where he’s from. I think it speaks a lot to his character and work ethic, especially when you look at the consistency of his work.”

Yeh cites car customizer Chip Foose as another influence: “He makes every part an enhancement of the overall picture.” More inspiration, perhaps surprisingly, came from Jesse James and (then) West Coast Choppers: “Jesse had the biggest attitude in the industry. He inspired me to believe in myself and ignore the critics.”

Not that there are many critics. Yeh has already passed the litmus test of custom bike companies: He gets coverage outside the traditional two-wheeled magazines and

websites. “I’m really grateful that people around the world like what I do,” he says. “And my market is broad – anywhere that FedEx delivers.”

His company might be called Rough Crafts, but Winston Yeh is one smooth operator.

Chris Hunter is the editor of Bike EXIF, the world’s leading custom motorcycle website. Visit www. bikeexif.com for more of his work. n No longer so Fat: New bodywork gives Shadow Rocket a sleek look. Concealed Progressive Suspension parts drop ride height. Wheels are forged-aluminum RSD Black Ops, 18-inch at the front, 16 at the back.