There's a lot to be said about the power of youth and the unique ability you have when you are young to ignore past and present, and instead focus deep into the future. With age comes nostalgia, the burdens of memory and experience that inevitably tie you to the things of your past. But when you are young you essentially have no past, and all your energy remains focused squarely on the promise, possibility and potential of the future. It's exactly this youthful spirit that makes custom sportbike builder Dean Kawczak, just 24 years old, such a perfect player in the Metric Revolution sportbike build-off (www.metrictv.com), a televised sportbike competition that aims to push the world of custom motorcycle design and construction in bold new directions. And it comes as no surprise that Kawczak was the mind behind one of the most original and innovative custom sportbikes that the show spawned, the bike you are looking at here.
Looking at Kawczak's radically reshaped Suzuki GSX-R1000 is like looking at a motorcycle from 20 years in the future. While other build-off competitors relied on garish chrome, candy paint and other over-the-top elements to make an impression, Kawczak's creation is almost understated, and instead makes its impression with flawless design, aggressive styling and fiercely innovative technology like the transparent Lexan wheels, perimeter brakes and sprocket, hidden controls, and myriad other details that just make you shake your head. It's almost hard to believe that it's real-it looks like an R&D design study or concept bike from a Japanese manufacturer, or maybe an impressive exercise in Photochop. But believe us when we tell you this is a real-deal, rideable custom turned out not by a million-dollar design studio, but one young man's bare hands, in a modest shop in Feura Bush, a small town in upstate New York.
This isn't the first time that Super Streetbike readers have seen work from Kawczak's LBF (Louder, Badder, Faster) Cycles-his was the shop that brought us the also-outrageous three-wheeled Hayabusa ("Tripl3 Threat") featured in our July 2005 issue, and that was the custom that originally caught the attention of the Metric TV producers and got him a spot in this career-making build-off. Obviously, the stakes are very high when you're talking about potential exposure in front of millions of television viewers, so Kawczak knew with this build-off bike that he had to put out something truly amazing, beyond anything he had done before, even the tandem-wheeled 'Busa. "I wanted to make a huge impact," Kawczak says. "I wanted to bring sportbikes to the level where choppers are, fabrication-wise, to make a point that sportbike guys can do more than just bolt together bikes with off-the-shelf parts and chrome."
Metric Revolution builders didn't choose the bikes that they built-the television producers provided the base bikes, and they delivered a zero-mile Suzuki GSX-R1000 (sourced from Seymour's Motor Sports, an upstate New York Suzuki dealership Kawczak worked at for a few years) to the LBF shop and gave Kawczak just 180 days from start to finish to complete his transformation. If you look closely, you can still see the basic Suzuki styling cues, though Kawczak has completely reimagined the lines of the familiar Gixxer. Kawczak and his LBF staff (brother Don Kawczak, Nick Dagastino and Kevin O'Connell) first "de-seamed" the fairing, removing all the panels and plastic welding them together to create a smooth, one-piece appearance. LBF also radically reworked the front of the bike, removing the stock headlight and filling the opening (the headlights have now been relocated to inside the fairing's ram air openings, using lights from Yamaha Banshee ATV), likewise filling the windscreen opening and radically cutting down the upper fairing to lower the front profile of the bike and remove some visual weight.
Like the fairing, the fuel tank on this bike is an original GSX-R piece that has been modified so far that it hardly resembles the starting point. LBF began by chopping three inches off the top to maintain the bike's low profile and, since the tank is no longer required to carry fuel (more on that in a minute...), the top was replaced with a clear sheet of Lexan to allow you to see through to the motor. Once lowered, LBF stretched the tank three inches in length, maintaining the lower edge to hug the frame and visually lengthen the look of the bike. The tailsection is stock GSX-R as well-Kawczak loved the lines-but that of course has been tweaked too with the bulbous-looking blinkers shaved off the sides, a custom undertray to smooth out the bottom and a tiny diamond-shaped taillight. The gorgeously shaped, minimalist seat is molded Lexan and sits on top of a highly modified sub-frame. Look closely and you'll see the sub-frame no longer bolts to the main spars-LBF welded the frame and the sub-frame together and then meticulously molded the lines to remove the unsightly sub-frame mounting hardware and give the frame a more organic look-that's attention to detail, typical on this bike.