Chicken Salad

Jeremy was focusing on making parts, wishing he was creating a new motorcycle instead, when Bruce Walker Jr. pulled up to the back door. He had a chopped up '79 XS650 that started out as a big idea but ended up a single frame on the shop floor, and wanted to know whether Jeremy could make use of it. Jeremy could not pass up the opportunity for an awesome project, but it took several months for anything to take shape. The creation of a new bike is always dependent upon the sale of another, and in this case it was the sale of the Panster (shipped all the way to Germany) that enabled Jeremy to start a new project. His mind follows one track at a time, and leaving this Yamaha halfway was enough to drive him crazy. "Still trying to keep it similar than our other bikes, we hard tailed the stock frame, kept the stock front end, and moved the front wheel to the rear. The offset brake disc and small rear sprocket seemed the perfect setup to run both on the same side, so the front wheel was modified to accept both and moved to its new location on the back of the bike. To keep both brakes on the left side we got an XS1100 dual disc front wheel and left side caliper then shaved the unneeded stuff from it as well as the right leg. The stock front end was bolted up using tapered bearings and custom trees which were designed to work with the front shroud we cut from a piece of aluminum sheet." The bars are stubbed into the aluminum upper tree, eliminating the need for clamps or risers and the tank is a re-tunneled Honda CL360 with a 3 inch wedge cut out of the center. Plans for the engine included a cleaning, inspecting, and resealing session, but Jeremy was impressed by the engineering and hated to let a good opportunity for innovation go to waste. So, he ordered a 750 cylinder kit from XS performance. For carburetion, stock was swapped for Mikuni round sliders in which he replaced and dressed up the gaskets, seals, and timing belts. All the minute details fell in place during the process and it churned out many of the XS parts for LC Fab. The name Chicken Salad came as a good explanation of the starting point versus the final transformation. With some hard work and elbow grease, Jeremy was able to make chicken salad out of chicken crap.

Photo courtesy of: Tommy Thompson