The following pages will attempt to document my BMW airhead projects. I am writing these pages as I know what a wonderful resource other people’s pages have been to me and I hope that some small detail of what I put up here might help someone else out at some point in their own project.
I have always loved all things BMW- a ’72 BMW 2002 was my first car (bought new by my grandfather) and owning some classic beemer bikes had always been on the to-do list. I particularly like toaster tank /5s and the classic r90s. These will be the subject of future projects hopefully!
As a first foray into the world of airhead rebuilding, I didn’t want to start with something I considered of great collectable value. I anticipated that I would make many mistakes and learn a lot and preferred to have a “trial run” at these bikes. So I began to look locally for a cheap airhead with a view to a not necessarily faithful restoration. In my area, R65 variants are quite abundant and although I don’t appreciate the aesthetic as much (not a particular fan of the tank shape) I thought one of these would be a good first project.
It didn’t take me long to find the perfect bike- a pretty unhappy 1982 R65LS which had already had half hearted café conversion attempt but, as I would find out later, very little in the way of mechanical intervention. It was dirty, and in average condition. Nonetheless, it’s a testament to these bikes that despite this the bike ran reliably and started cold.
The goals of the project were starting to crystallise in my head; I knew I didn’t want to do a faithful restoration of an R65- I couldn’t see myself wanting to own a perfectly restored R65 long-term (75/5 and R90s are my goals in that regard) and I also worried that if I did an average job rebuilding (this is my first project) I might feel bad about on-selling. Also, I’m a pretty nostalgic guy and I thought I might want to keep my first project even if it was poorly executed in some respects. So, I decided that this first project would be an attempt at a tasteful custom build based on the R65 core. Now before anyone criticises this, it should be clear from what I’ve written above that I love faithfully restored bikes and intend to do some in the future. Furthermore, I recognise that some people will love faithfully restored R65’s- but this bike wasn’t a great candidate for that kind of resto anyway.
Having decided this, I set about finding inspiration based on Google searches! Whilst I know that traditional shaped R80 tanks can be swapped into the R65, I wanted to try and make a build that used the original R65 tank, despite it being the least aesthetic part of the bike for me. This was my challenge. I found a couple of bikes online that I thought achieved my goal and finally decided to try and reproduce the bike shown below, created by fellow Aussies over in Fremantle. I should stress here that I don’t know either the owner of this bike, or the builders (Retro Moto Co) however I would like to acknowledge their respective taste and execution. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
The following pages will document all the jobs along the way, hopefully with lots of pictures and insights for anyone who is following a similar path afterwards. Please feel free to contact me with any questions!
