Jesse forbes – The Midori Bomb (green in Japanese)… 8 years ago an idea came to mind while having a conversation with a fellow Airmen 6,000 miles away from home in a desert know as QATAR. We shared a passion for wrench spinning and spent long days in the hot desert (140 degrees on the flightline) of maintaining aircraft talking about motorcycles and cars where our real interest lies back at home. This cool kid knew about the Japanese style bobbers and choppers and began to enlighten me of other cool two wheeled machines that existed other than the v-twin Harley..
As he was speaking, the ideas were already in motion and once returning home I found myself completing a 800 dollar purchase of a 1979 xs 650 special with 9,000 miles on it that was taken very good care of….only if that individual knew I was about to take a saws all to it within 24 hours I probably wouldn’t be owning such a nice untouched piece of Japanese machinery.
Shortly arriving in the mail was a hard tail from what was once in existence black widows choppers and numerous tanks ordered until I found the right one….the salinas boys specialty “Cole Foster”. It just fit in every way shape and form. Once the frame was welded up and raked at 40 degrees, the foundation help generate the next idea. The influence for this bike came between hotrods and the shovelhead my father had built many years ago he called the “Green machine.” It seems like there was so much character in motorcycles back in the 70’s and 80’s time frame that new motorcycles manufactured today are solely made to profit rather than focus on individuality, it was hard to ignore the originality. I knew this was not going to be a run of the mill “Me too bike” so I made it out in every way capable to be different.
That’s when thoughts of whitewalls, velocity stacks, stick shifter, diagonal pipes, and some 20 mm aircraft rounds for grips come to mind. It’s easy to throw parts on a bike but to make those parts flow homogenously, it is where the cut, weld, fit, re-cut, re-weld, re-fit process became very time consuming (I could have probably built 3 bikes now in the same time but this was my first). And thanks to Hughs handbuilt for offering the pma kit to run without battery just helps achieve the simple and sleek look. Then what better than to highlight everything with candy paint over ground steel to give it a light reflecting marble effect trimmed in some gold scroll….these were my thoughts anyways. So after 8 years of life priorities getting in the way, I am at the final stages of this build all I needs now is a grood scrub down and some polish anyways.
