Shaw Harley-Davidson's Forty-Eight: 'The Mustard' - Battle Of The Kings 2019

Hi, I'm Neil. I come from Shore, Harley-Davidson. I'm up here at the Bike Share today to talk about our Battle of the Kings entry, the Mustang. So I just want to talk you through the reasons why we built this bike and how we went about it. The reason we built it is for a competition that Harley-Davidson hold called the Battle of the Kings. This is international, it's a competition based on public votes. We get to pick the bike that we want and then we get a set budget and we got to sort of stick to that as much as we can. So I want to run you through how we came up with this concept. What we did to start with, with the initial ideas the boss said and mentioned he wanted to do big fat tires. So we started from there and I'll just run you through the close-up details of the bike. So the bike we chose is the Harley-Davidson XL 48. I'll take you through some of the details that we've done on here. Starting at the front, we use the original wheels. We've had to remachine the lip just to get these alloy wheel covers in there. They're just bonded on. The idea of this is to create a really deep section of the tire to make the wheels look smaller and they've got like a really large rolling radius. Coming up we've got the headlight and there's cowling actually made from a rear fender. Just takes quite a while to cut it and we support all the brackets. We've lowered the headlight down by additional two and a half inches. The idea was that to get the front looking as low as possible. Up on the top, we've still got all the original Harley switch gear. We've got the Harley nostalgic grips going onto the Pro Street handlebar. Again, genuine Harley. Fuel tank. It's a stock tank. We didn't feel the need. We felt it fitted in quite nicely with the rest of the bike. Obviously just with a bit of paint detail. It's still running with a Harley crash bar. Not the normal thing that we'd put on a custom bike. We just felt it gave the bike a set of shoulders to be honest and it just filled in that empty gap. We changed the air cleaner again for another Harley part. The exhaust pipes. Again, all made to specially fit around the shape of the bike. We took it up along the side of the oil tank and that comes out as two exits in there. Further down, you'll see the belly pan down at the bottom there. It also covers up a lot of the original wiring and then we also put a center stand on there. Really just for display purposes. Coming along to the swinging arm. All we've done on the swinging arm, we've actually beefed it up with just some additional tubing on the side. More cosmetic and offers a little bit of crash protection if you're going to go that way. Along to the back, we've got the 12-inch lowered shocks. Again, normally come in chrome but we go that extra mile and spin them all up in the lathe and you get this nice machined finish. Stock rear pulley finished in the same color as the wheels and again with the discs and the ribbed tires. As you can see, the exhaust pipes come right up the side and we've gone for a twin exit on here. We actually had to run these underneath the seat which is why we've actually raised the seat unit up. The seat unit we've got on here, the back cowling is your generic calf racer style but the under support tray, we've had to make all of that in-house. All the supports on there were actually made from an old set of handlebars to raise the bike up. Retrimmed the seat again to our own design with a contrasting stitch in there as well. On the heat side of the exhaust, we've got these extra heat shields just to give the bike that little bit more depth on the side and again just to stop that heat from getting to your legs. As with all the Battle of the Kings bikes, they have to be road legal so we have got lights on the back. You'll see them come on there. The idea of tucking them in there is to try and get the reflection and that sort of laser light effect on there and then we also have the side mount number plate which again we all make those in-house as well. So what I'd like to do next is we'll get the bike outside and we'll fire it up and just prove to you that the bike does actually work. Right, let's fire the mustard up. So you've heard the bike. I hope you like it. Please click on the link and make a vote for it. Please subscribe and get your notification switched on so you can see our next up-and-coming videos. Thank you very much.