From a young age, I enjoyed motorcycles. I remember watching Top Gear with my brother and seeing Richard Hammond riding a Honda Blackbird and thinking, “That thing’s sweet, why don’t they have more of those on the show?” I would have loved to grow up with a motorcycle uncle or a dirt bike dad to introduce me to motorcycles. Fortunately for me, I grew up with someone even better. My mom has always been my top supporter, and even though she hated the idea of me on a motorcycle, she knew I had the will to get on one one way or another. So instead of helping me get on a running, riding motorcycle, she did the only thing she felt comfortable with; she helped me buy an engine from Harbor Freight, thinking there’s no way in hell it’ll ever end up creating one of those death machines.
The Harbor Freight Predator 212cc engine was perfect. It had 5 horsepower, came with an automatic transmission, and was so underpowered for its size that you could never break it.
I managed to get the engine to fit the correct way, but it took a lot of work. I had to bend the head stem forward to give the front tire enough clearance, which gave the front wheel that crazy rake angle. At this same time, I replaced the cable brake with a hydraulic brake on the front wheel only, and I welded in the worst-looking reinforcement you could imagine.
It was way more ugly than I had envisioned, but it kinda worked. My friends and I would tow the bike to the top of our street and rip it back down to my house. It had no pedals, so you just had to build momentum and hold on tight. We would hold time trials to see who could go the fastest, which meant who had the confidence to brake the least. After a while, even the speed of the gravity bike wasn’t enough. It was time to mount the engine for good.
Placing the engine in the frame was easy, mounting the gas tank was easy, installing the torque converter transmission was easy. Getting the rear sprocket attached to the rear wheel, and getting the chain to fit around the frame was not easy. The rear sprocket was bolted onto the spokes using a plate behind the spokes to sandwich the spokes. This is a terrible way to transfer power from the sprocket to the wheel, and I cannot believe that the spokes didn’t break. Due to the engine’s location, the chain was not able to go around the hardtail frame like it would on a real motorcycle, with half the chain above and half the chain below the hardtail. Instead, I was forced to have both sides of the chain right next to each other, supported by a chain tensioner. I have a very fond memory of my friend Josh riding the bike down a hill, having the chain fall off the front sprocket, and slap him in the ass repeatedly as he coasted to a stop.
So, I had the frame cut and rewelded, the engine mounted, the chain installed, and brakes installed; that’s pretty much everything you need. The day that I got my wisdom teeth pulled is the day I took my first test ride. I’m sure that’s a bad idea for numerous reasons, but there’s nothing better at distracting yourself from pain as frustration. I spent hours in my shed that night manhandling the engine into place and throwing parts together. It was about 10 pm at night, on a rainy Wednesday, missing four teeth, when I finally ripped the pull start and toodled up my road for the first time. It was glorious. Eight years later, I’m writing this, and I can still remember the cotton balls in my mouth, the taste of blood, the rain hitting my eyes. I loved it. This is the only clip I have from that night.
I ripped that bike everywhere. Over the next few months, I painted it, added a 100W LED, and an ammo can for battery storage, changed out the muffler, and made other small improvements. My friends would come over and take turns ripping it up the hill.
I even brought it to my high school track, where the same Josh who had his butt whipped by the chain dumped the bike on the 400-meter dash.
Sorry, Josh.
Even though the bike had its fair share of issues, we still had endless fun on it. I rode it to my first job at the butcher shop, and I rode it to school one day, riding on public roads like a dummy. One day we decided to speed test it on my street using a chase car to keep track of how fast I went; supposedly, I hit 55mph. Over time, the bike lost its appeal as I started searching for a real motorcycle. I painted the engine with white paint found in the garage. My friend Max and I tried to see what mixture ratio gasoline and diesel the engine could run on; turns out these little Harbor Freight motors can run on up to a 50/50 mix of gasoline and diesel. Not very well, but it will run, and best of all, it’ll roll coal.
Eventually, I bought my first real motorcycle, and this bike got retired to the same leaf pile next to the shed where I had found the frame. A few months later, the engine was used in a friend’s go-kart, and that was the end of this bike. Somewhere over the years, I lost track of that engine; it’s likely been sent to the dump or sold as scrap metal by now. As soon as the engine was out of the frame, the frame was in my mom’s recycle bin with a cardboard box hiding it. Part of me wishes I had kept this bike in one piece as a token of my motorcycle history, but it’s probably best not to show off those welds too much.
