Regardless of its rising recognition, the Nineteen Eighties Okay-series BMW stays a tough bike to customise. There’s hardly an inch of it that isn’t blocky, angular, or simply plain awkward—so it takes a pointy eye and deft hand to therapeutic massage it right into a slick and cohesive café racer. Enter Chris Scholtka.
Based mostly in Cottbus, Germany, Chris splits his time between his job as a firefighter and his after-hours customized bike-building endeavor, Motocrew. He cracked the code for constructing razor-sharp BMW Okay-series café racers some time in the past, and he’s produced a handful of them since. However his newest construct—a 1984 BMW K100 café racer—hits a bit of in a different way.
The undertaking was commissioned by a good friend who had discovered a 1984 BMW K100 that was in nice form and needed it custom-made. He naturally known as Chris first—however Chris was hesitant to take the job.
“My first thought that it wasn’t a good suggestion,” he explains, “as a result of I don’t need to construct the identical shit repeatedly. However this time my buyer had a large enough price range to construct one thing distinctive. So I mentioned sure, and, after a few hours brainstorming with him, we settled on a fundamental setup.”
“Since everybody has been customizing these bikes, this one needed to be a particular, one-of-a-kind BMW K100. It needed to be low and loud, and it needed to have hints of the previous Formulation One John Participant Particular livery. It’s elegant and it by no means will get previous.”
Earlier than he acquired to tweaking the BMW K100’s bodywork, Chris concocted an elaborate plan to provide its operating gear a significant overhaul. The modifications begin out again, the place the rear wheel from a 2000s BMW K1200S is mated to the swingarm and ultimate drive from a Nineteen Nineties BMW K1100. A completely adjustable shock from Touratech’s suspension line, Black-T, props up the rear.
Becoming the K1200S wheel to the K1100 swingarm known as for some intelligent CNC machining, whereas becoming the swingarm to the K100 known as for a bit of black magic. There’s extra wizardry up entrance, the place Chris handled the BMW to the cast aluminum entrance wheel, adjustable Showa forks, and twin Brembo calipers from a 2019-model Ducati Panigale.
“The Ducati entrance finish was very onerous to seek out at an inexpensive value,” Chris tells us. “It ended up costing double the value of the donor bike.”
Transferring to the bodywork, Chris created a set of ‘wings’ to cowl up the indentations on the OEM gasoline tank that used to accommodate the K100’s touring fairing. Every one is made out of robust PVC plastic and stabilized by a home made metal mounting body.
Additional again, he employed the identical trick that he’s used on previous K100 builds to sharpen up the bike’s silhouette. A signature Motocrew subframe sits simply above the unique body, which in flip has been trimmed to match. It’s a sublime resolution that negates the necessity for a full body redesign.
A customized saddle is perched up high, adopted by a home made tail bump. Chris needed to strive one thing new with the taillight, so he made his personal, utilizing LEDs and a hand-formed plexiglass lens. The sunshine is oriented vertically fairly than horizontally, and runs ‘over’ the again of the tail earlier than disappearing beneath it.
Slightly below that, the inventory bike’s abbreviated subframe rails are trimmed with a pair of LED flip alerts. The license plate has been relocated to the side-mounted bracket that’s hooked up to the swingarm.
Beneath the hood, Chris rebuilt the K100’s motor and rewired the bike with Motogadget parts; customary process on all of his builds. 3D-printed consumption manifolds with a Okay&N filter exchange the airbox, whereas a customized four-into-one exhaust system snakes its manner right into a rowdy underslung muffler. A hydraulic clutch improve comes courtesy of the nice people at Powerbrick.
All of those modifications, in response to Chris, are designed to tug the 80s inline-four into the fashionable age. “For those who run your eyes over it,” he says, “the whole lot makes it seem like a motorcycle from 2024, in each facet.”
This ethos is carried by way of to the cockpit, which options new clip-ons, a Domino throttle, Brembo grasp cylinders, and trendy switchgear. The grips, bar-end flip alerts, and single rear-view mirror are all from Motogadget, as is the digital sprint, which is mounted on carbon fiber spacers to tuck it as near the headlight as attainable.
As for the sunshine itself, that’s from a Husqvarna TC 450 enduro bike; an impressed selection, and a welcomed break from the standard choices of a spherical gentle or a flat quantity board. Rear-set foot controls and a graceful filler cap, all from Powerbrick, end off the components spec.
After which there’s the K100’s new livery—an effortlessly cool tribute to the John Participant Particular designs of the previous, with consideration given to the whole lot from the bodywork to the engine and different onerous components. Chris additionally had the wheels powder coated, redid the fork uppers, and gave the fork lowers a black frictionless coating. (He even picked the Heidenau K73 tires as a result of they remind him of older F1 rain tires.)
The outcome is just not solely top-of-the-line BMW K100 café racers that we’ve seen from Motocrew, however top-of-the-line Okay-series customs we’ve seen, interval. Now if somebody needs to throw one other fats wad of money at him to construct one thing even wilder, we’ll be standing by.
Motocrew Instagram | Pictures by kylefx
