yamaha road star / wild star bobber

I live on the Central Coast of California and ride along the beach a lot, Morro Bay and Cayucos area and a lot of riding through the coastal mountains.  I grew up on motorcycles, dirt bikes, motocross, and some street bikes.  For a long time wanted to build a Neo-Vintage Bobber.

Finally started about 5 months ago, bought a stock 03 Yamaha Wild Star (Road Star) 1600cc in mint cond, with only 17k miles on it.  Couldn’t wait to get it home and get started.  I had already bought some of the parts I was going to incorporate into the build.

I am a CG Artist Educator by trade, and I had used various software such as Photoshop and Autodesk CAD Inventor to pre-visualize some of the work.  I wanted to stick to an old school theme and a very clean composition with a simple color scheme using Black, Red and Brass accents.

Also, I had a big desire to incorporate wood into the build, so I ended up using redwood to create the footboards and battery cover under the seat, as well as one of the plug covers for the swingarm, using a piece of redwood fencing material, that I also stained to match the tank and sealed with Marine Varnish for durability.

Another important goal was to incorporate 1959 Cadillac Red Rocket Tail lights.  As a kid I grew up with my cousin who owned most of the 59 Cad models, even a Hearst.  Always thought how cool those lights might look on a motorcycle,  but to make it work…  I finally found some Kawasaki turn signal stems that matched the diameter of the Cad lenses, I still had to re-engineer the internal parts of the stems for them to hook up properly.  The mirrors are vintage Ford style, I re-engineered those to fit the metric fittings on the bike.

Except for the tank, which was shot by a father and son team out of Hanford CA,  I did all of the painting of the parts, such as the fork covers and headlight rim.  The amber headlight was achieved by using transparent glass stain on the lens and adding a triumph style wire stone guard.

In order to create and fit the redwood plate under the custom La Rosa leather seat, I marked out a plexiglass template to fit the complex shape, so I could see thru to the parts and then used that as a jig for the redwood.  Other small touches were the vintage grips, 44 cal brass tire airstem caps, Corona bottle cap on the choke, old style air cleaner, crankcase breather filter and brass parts in specific locations, also trimmed the belt cover and installed military pins to the footboards.

Getting ready to install a coker super eagle vintage front tire and finish the fork braces over the front tire, the metal brackets I have made and installed, still need to bend and weld the 3/4 inch steel rod in a u shape over the front tire.  Did all the metal work with a grinder and sanders.  Created the special brackets for example to mount the vintage Harley front turn signals under the headlight.

The pipes are Thunderheader pipes and they sound great, remind me of revin up a dragster.  I get a lot of Harley guys that like the style of the bike and most aren’t sure what their looking at until I explain.  The wildstar engine in engineered extremely well and very reliable.

The LaRose bobber seat is very comfortable, the hairpin springs give very nicely over bumps and had good padding, I chose that particular seat, because it reminded of an old baseball mit from when I was a kid.

I will never be finished with the build because I would never want to be,  but I would like to build out a café racer someday.

All the best,

AL Williams

You can find out more the bike on AL’s build site, right here.

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