Custom V4 Bike Build. Proudly South African.
Words: Fergal McAdam, Séan Hendley, Donovan Fourie
Pics: Deon van der Linde
Editing: Glenn Foley
It’ll be fun, they said… And it was!
Initially, to be honest, there was a fair amount of trepidation on our side about riding some back-yard mechanic-wannabe’s attempt at building a homemade bike from junk he had lying around his garage. That took all of 2 km riding this contraption to dispel and then the in-bred redneck hillbilly in us kicked it way through any sort of reason and self-preservation and it was game on, and the mealie fields were alive with the sound of music…
The music of our people, a lekker dik roaring Ford V-engine with minimal silencing…
To be honest, calling Fergal McAdam “some back-yard mechanic-wannabe”, is completely unfair. Fergal has built a few race bikes and prettied up some road bikes but…. to build something like this was his first time. And he built it economically with the idea that if it was a balls up, it wasn’t going to be a huge issue.
And when the bike was up and running and trouble free, then he would take it apart and paint it and make up a proper electrical harness with all the plugs and all that.
FM: “Well, that was the plan,” Fergal says. “The problem is, I use it quite a lot so I haven’t got around to painting etc just yet but I must finish it off…. Eventually”
RF: To be honest, if this is Fergal’s idea of an unfinished build or imperfect build, then this is the guy you want to build you a bike if you are ever that way inclined. Dammn…. This thing is pretty near perfect in our eyes, especially when you consider how long (or short) it took him to put it all together…
FM: “Ok – the actual building time was only two to three weeks…. spread over a lot more time than that was because of the following: Firstly, a mate, Vaughan made the exhaust and fuel tanks in exchange for a fan extraction on his paint booth. This took him many months but eventually it got done. Then the adapter plate for engine to gearbox and my input as to how to make the Guzzi clutch work with the Ford flywheel and keep the weight down also took forever and three visits to the guys shop to… ‘speed’ him along a bit, (Approximately six months). So basically, in terms of the build, all I had to do was to fit the stuff.”
RF: Yup, it’s usually all those finicky outsourced jobs that can be really frustrating and time consuming. Importantly for us is how well everything was put together and how nicely the bike rides and handles. You know, all the stuff that keeps it all together and planted on the road.
FM: “The frame mod for Guzzi to accommodate the engine and front end was literally two afternoons and a few beers. Prior to adding all the bits, we set the bike up in a jig and made sure it ran true. We used the standard Guzzi geometry on the front end but used Kawa 1300 forks with springs urated by about 80% to give it a nice ride but are strong enough the carry the weight”
RF: So, that is the main body of the build, wiring and all the small bits, the finishing touches?
FM: “The wiring took a full day. One Saturday I got up at 5am and finished that night. We made the covers and gauge housing/panel in our workshops and other odds and ends. The pipe adaptors and radiator brackets etc were probably a day or two, (we had a junior boilermaker at the time), I made up some cardboard templates for the front end and various mounting spots and we simply welded them up using a coded welder. Spray work was a truck chassis black paint except for the two tanks, another mate painted those. The smalls probably took a week.”
It all sounds so elegantly simple when Fergal explains it so easily and eloquently and if you have the skill set, the tools and the means and the motivation then it probably is…. we assume. All we know is, it is a neck twisting, eye catching, conversation starting beast that is total primal joy to ride, you know – when something makes you so happy you want to roar at the top of your lungs as you roar along.
Séan says:
Yoh! Yoh! Yoh! Any day on a bike is my favourite day, but this day was my most favourite of favourite days. I remember pulling an engine exactly like this one, a Ford Essex V4 out of my Old Man’s Transit Van back in the early eighties as a teenager when we built it into a Passion Wagon. Back then I remember it being a huge lump to man handle around and would have never guessed that I would be keen to ride a bike that somebody had bolted said lump into.
At 2m tall I dwarf 99.9% of motorcycles these days, but initially even I found this creation a bit intimidatingly large. Power delivery, clutching and changing gears were also a concern. I was expecting to find a suicide shift with a foot clutch ala VW trike and I do recall that, even in a heavy 70’s Transit van this engine was no slouch.
Fergal had modded the original Guzzi gearbox and clutch onto the Ford engine and flywheel. Being a Racing Snake, Fergal has mounted the rear sets backwards and upwards like a race bike. Even though it has wide cruiser style bars on it, the seat is high enough that your seating position is quite superbike-esque and you have enough room to move around on the seat to make that seating position less or more aggressive depending on your preference.
The weight, balance and braking and their individual effects on the bikes handling dynamics took the most getting used to. The weight and balance were easily learned, stopping a runaway train would seem like an easier task than slowing this rig down on its old school 400cc brakes. Yet Fergal assured me there was more than enough engine braking to negate having to use the brakes at all. And this was proved when a Tannie pulled out of the local Kerk in front of me, freaked out when she saw me ambling along at 70 kmh, stomped on her brakes, got even more freaked out and got back on the gas again before …. Thankfully… stalling. I worked the clutch and kicked down hard through the old Guzzi box and stomped on all the hooks hard. This Beast would have split her little white Fiesta in half, fortunately it is one extremely well thought out and put together bit of mechanical ingenuity and it slowed down as implored to do and with a quick little flip flop right and left we managed to duck around the Tannie growling at her much louder than that Essex engine could contemplate matching.
So, with that ‘crash course’, (almost too literally), in the braking and handling dynamics of Ford O’Guzzi I was off to the races. For such a big looking lump, this bike is surprisingly agile and light on its feet when it gets down to business. Get her revving and piloting along at speed and it feels as natural and as nimble as any old school sport bike out there. At high speeds it is stable and tracks beautifully. Lobbing it into long sweeping bends is as easy and a whole lot more fun than any bike I’ve ridden, I saw a speed of around 180 km/h before the road got clogged up with rolling hazards. Fergal assures me he has gotten it up to 196khm. Which might not sound a lot for a big 2.0lt V4 motor, but you must remember it is restricted by its 1982 Moto Guzzi gearbox and diff, so 196kmh on those is very impressive.
Truth be told, tilting into slower, sharper corners did remind me just how my huevos un-grandes really were. Whacking on the throttle and tearing off through the hills is quite a bit of fun until you crest a hill and the road meanders off to the right or left a whole sooner than you expect, which clenched my arse cheeks properly as I slowed the behemoth down and tilted it into the corner while still trying to look cool and professional for the cameras. A few laps up and down at the camera mans behest of “Do that again…. Do that again…. Do that again…” and I pretty much worked out how hard I needed to accelerate, when I needed to brake as I tilted in before accelerating out the other side. It is actually magnificently good fun.
However, being perched on top of a naked, throbbing Ford engine, bumbling along slowly for the camera in the blazing sun at in 41°C heat wrapped in leather, Kevlar and denim with zero airflow and absolutely no hydration did give me delusional flashback of my days in the military being chased around the desert by a sadistic corporal. Man, that thing gets properly hot when you ride it too slowly, this is a bike you want to ride fast on the coldest day of winter, not slowly on the hottest spring day in recorded history. I was eternally grateful for the aramid material in my jeans protecting my knees from the two twin header pipes popping out either side of the engine under the two chromed tappet covers. Fergal has fashioned a heat shield that works well when at speed. He has also fitted two radiators, one from a Kawa 750 and one on the bottom of the motor from a Kawa dirt bike. The water pump has been modified to be stronger and more efficient, but he then had to fit a galvanised coil in the feed pipe to stop the pump sucking the hose flat.
Riding the GUZZI V4, as Fergal has labelled it, in a gentlemanly fashion is very pleasant. Plenty of low-down torque, easy acceleration and fairly easy handling with suspension that soaks up all the bumps and lumps in our roads. Even turning it a lower speed is fairly easy. But the really surprising bit was that after we had found a local Spaza shop and drank all their mineral water we headed back to Jo’Burg and the East Rand in gridlocked rush hour traffic through the ‘Flying Saucer’ interchange made even worse by the ongoing multiple sinkhole repairs. The big girl squeezed between the rolling road hazards eloquently to the point I even managed to shake a driver’s hand as he had it draped out his window – very much to his alarm then mirth as he heard my chortle as I rode away. I got back to the office a good 45 mins ahead of my colleagues in the camera vehicle.
Fuel consumption? Well, that depends on your right hand. Go easy and she is surprisingly fuel efficient, crank on the gas and you can watch the fuel drain in the windows of the dual fuel tanks. But, do you build a hot rod for fuel efficiency or for fun?
Don, from The Bike Show came along for the ride and had this to say:
It’s always a bit nerve wracking when you ride something that somebody built, especially if you don’t know much about the person, you don’t know what they do or what their skill level is. And this is quite a big undertaking putting a big old car motor in an old classic motorcycle frame.
You know… there is a lot that can go wrong.
Aaannnnddddd… it didn’t, really. I honestly thought that we were going to have some big problems.
First of all the engine is bolted on using metal on metal on metal and then a thin little bit of hand grips, I thought I was going to have the living daylights rattled out of me. I thought it would shake, I thought it would feel rough and that is often what happens with these customised motorcycles with people who change motors around. They tend to feel good but rough, not quite refined and I suspect that this is just good engineering and a good choice of that motor in that it didn’t do anything like I was expecting.
I mean, it is very smooth, there is a bit of vibration, you can feel it through the bars a tiny bit but it really is not bad, it is not something that will numb your fingers or dislocate your joints.
The other thing I was worried about is that it would not turn because it weighs more than a train.
But then you get to the first corner and I thought that instead of turning I was just going to keep going straight and never stop… ever. To my absolute surprise I went around the corner and I thought… “Hang on… I’m not dead, when did that happen?”
Never in my imagination did I ever think that would happen. It really is just a collection of bikes; it is as if somebody built a classic motorcycle but in the early eighties it would come out something like this. So, to me it is a classically built custom motorcycle. And honestly, I love motorcycles like these and I love the people that take the time and who take the effort to build motorcycles like these. It is built purely out of love, it is built purely out of passion and it is so great that there are people out there who do stuff like this and it is even more of a privilege to get to ride something like this.
Got an interesting bike you’d like featured?
Drop us a mail: info@motomedia.co.za
www.motomedia.co.za
