What building a Café Racer Really Means
Successfully building a café racer—in this case also known as a rat-café, since we’ll be doing it on the cheap, means creating a bike that is really light, handles extremely well, and on a tight, twisty mountain road, could outperform virtually any vehicle on the planet. With enough piloting skill—and we’ll get into that later—you can keep up with an even beat someone on a bike with much better horsepower.
These bikes are built for tight roads, and what that means is that you get a big advantage over a guy on some crotch rocket big sports bike. Even with their horsepower advantage, you still win. Here’s why: the bike is lighter, and with lighter rims and tires, it can flop over onto its side in a full “battle lean” faster and easier than anything short of the highest-end (and highest-price) regular bikes out there.
This doesn’t mean you should go out and challenge everyone to a race, however, since the advantage won’t be huge. But on a tight, twisty road up in the mountains, it’s enough to impress and occasionally embarrass a new pilot on a much better bike.
And if you drop more than $3,000 on your bike, then it’s a fair bet that you did something very wrong. These bikes can be done cheaply and easily. That light bike means not a lot of heavy, expensive parts. That’s what success looks like in the case of building your own café racer.
When you go for rims, go as light as you possibly can. This is really important when it comes to creating a really high-performing canyon racer café bike. Read through to a later chapter for more details on this.
Your carburetor should be a well-tuned factory model—you’ll usually want to go for a CV, though in this particular book, we’ll go into some serious detail on carburetors, so stay tuned. Even better—and remember, we’ll go over this more lately on—some sort of round slide or flat slide carb.
If you’re on the small side, or even an average-sized pilot, you’ll be able to get away with something as small as a twin 350 cc up to a 500 cc, or maybe a 500-650 single cylinder motor. This means about between 35 and 45 horse power. If you’re a larger rider, you might want to try looking for something more in the 65-75 horse power range. This means a bigger twin, or something along the lines of a 4-banger engine of about 650 up to 750cc. This means you’ll want to get a classic air-cooled four-cylinder as opposed to something more modern, like a water-cooled super sport motor.
One of the biggest things about these bikes is the cosmetic side. Everybody can tell a café racer by the classic, retro outfitting. They all have a similar look, even though each one is a little different.
The café racer is not just a bike. It is a lifestyle, and that is often the reason why it is so important you build your own. This bike is an extension of your personality, and it should reflect you in every way.
It’s important to remember that there are not many rules when it comes to building your café racer. Most of the stuff that other people are doing involves trying to imitate what was done in England when bikers took their father’s motorcycles and turned them into their own style icons. This means you can turn just about anything into a café racer. That’s part of the point. It’s really up to you.
