Sydney Custom Spraypainting Racing

When you’re the leading spraypainter in Sydney, your own bike—a sweet-looking Dyna drag bike—is sure to look red hot.

IT’S A Harley-Davidson Dyna that I bought as a write-off. It had about 1400 kays on it; front-end was snapped off; swingarm was bent. I had the stock Dyna swingarm extended and strengthened. I had some race parts from my road-racing days—Sportster-type parts for the front-end, etc. Sold the engine and bought the 124-cubic-inch motor in bits. Peter from P&L Performance Cycles did the full build on the engine. I basically just built it as a drag bike to have some fun with and to go fairly quick.

I’ve been racing it for about three years now. Ran it for the three years of the S&S 124 Series. We just joined ANDRA this year in the National Series.

It was a pretty good bike right from the start. We lightened as much as we could without changing the idea of it still being a Harley-Davidson. I didn’t wanna run Jap bike wheels and too-light parts or anything like that and have breakages. It’s been really reliable. I’ve probably done 20 race meetings in three years.

I go to Sydney, plus Brisbane and Victoria. We’ve been down to Heathcote in country Victoria a couple of times. That’s a good quarter mile track. We’ve done a few of the one-eighth mile tracks in Queensland, like Roma 500 kays west of Brisbane. Best to date’s 136 mph and a 10.1.

I wanna thank my Dad for coming along to every meet with me. And recently my son Max has been coming interstate with us. He’s always been mucking around with bikes; riding dirt bikes and things.

An American mob, RB Racing, made the pipes. They’re called 124 Challenge pipes. My cousin put them on his street bike and got another six horsepower out of it.

A mate, Bob from BPM (Bob’s Performance Modifications), has been giving us a hand in the last year or so with the tuning of the bike. He’s helped get the carby sorted out and it starts a lot easier now. You can launch it better. He also did a bit of work to the heads.

It runs a stock Harley gearbox. It’s running a stock clutch, just Dyna. No real problems there. It’s been great.

I’ve been mucking around with the rear suspension. They’re adjustable Yamaha R1 shocks. I was finding that on takeoff the old ones were bottoming out so hard that it was bouncing back up. You want it to go down slow, but not too slow, and when it comes back up, you want it to rebound so it doesn’t go up too high and unload the wheel, causing wheelspin.

When I built it, it was the quickest Harley-Davidson in Australia. I was doing 10.2s in the Screamin’ Eagle competition. No-one was doing that, except for the V-Rods or any wheelie-bar bike. It’s basically in street-trim with treaded tyres.

Phil the Wirer sorted everything out in that regard and did a great job, as usual. What I like about him is you tell him what you want and he just does it.

I put the paint on, of course. Purple’s sort of the company colour—my bikes are purple; my van’s got purple graphics on it. I wanted a simple basic graphic that could be seen from the grandstands. With all the chrome and the purple and a fairly basic flame job, it looks pretty good.

Sydney Custom Spraypainting, 6 Cann Street Guildford NSW 2161; 02-9721-2244.

pics by Wasko; words by Mark

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