How to Make a Chopper With 46-Inch Wheels Turn
It’s all good sticking 46-inch wheels on your custom-built chopper, but how do you make such a huge motorcycle actually turn?
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54 years 8 monthsThe guys at Grind Hard Plumbing Co. are hardly strangers to building bonkers custom vehicles, but their ‘monster chopper’ is surely one of the most insane.
They’re a decent way into the build by now, so it’s perhaps a surprise that they’re only now figuring out the steering and the exhaust.
Although a large amount of parts on the bike are entirely custom-made, the new steering system uses bought parts, albeit ordered to a custom specification. The previous system had been hydraulic, but the new one uses a fairly expensive cable setup. The bike requires something relatively uncommon for a motorcycle because of the way the front wheel connects to the bike, which is via a kind of multi-pronged swingarm rather than a more traditional fork.
Like the steering, the new exhaust system is also bought, this time a full system from Arrow. The silencer, though, was custom-built.
The latest instalment in the YouTube series documenting the bike’s construction also features the build of a new kickstand and a redesign of the rear wheel’s drive connection, with much of the work being done to strengthen the bike’s construction - with such huge wheels, log wheelbase, and 160bhp from a 1,250cc KTM LC8 V-twin, there’s a lot of force to be accounted for.
One thing especially appealing about this bike is that it has no bodywork, which means you can admire the engineering uninterruptedly. On something so spectacularly weird, that seems like a good choice.
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Image credit: Grind Hard Plumbing Co./YouTube.