Christian's Bikes - Wilson Fabrication

Honda CB500 Custom

This started as a junkyard special, no gas tank, no wiring harness and no subframe. Perfect for a project.

I started this build by picking out spare parts at the same junkyard that I bought the bike. The handle bars are off a 90’s KTM two stroke, gas tank from a Honda cruiser and the rear shock is from a Yamaha R1. With the handlebars mounted I set out to build a mount for the gas tank, rear shock and seat, this took the form of a stainless steel heavy gauge sheet metal subframe that you see welded directly to the frame. It had to be strong enough to support my weight and the forces of the rear shock.

Kawasaki Ninja 600 Brawler

Luke and I bought this bike for $300 a couple miles outside of Boulder. When we bought it, it was missing a gas tank, seat, sub frame, headlight and exhaust. Again, perfect for a project. Like the previous bike I had to replace the gas tank and subframe, but this time we took a more difficult approach. We found this absolutely beautiful Yamaha gas tank, to this day we don’t know what it came off of. It was not even close to fitting on the frame, the sheet metal on the underside was shaped to fit a spar style frame like a Harley Davidson, which isn’t even close to how this sportbike frame was built. But the tank had to fit, so I cut the sheet steel out from the bottom of the tank and we slowly welded in new steel shaped to fit around our frame, this kept the outside shape while allowing it to sit at the proper height on the bike.

With the tank done I set off on the subframe. This subframe was built from 3/8 inch mild tube steel, all of it hand bent using a shitty harbor freight tube bender. It was miserable, but so worth it. Every tube was cut to cleanly integrate into the next tube, the tail lights were built directly into the ends of the tube steel frame, the battery and seat had proper mounting locations. It really was a thing of beauty.

We also hand bent a custom set of handlebars, and welded up a custom headlight and dash gauge bracket

Though it doesn’t look the best in this picture, it was a beauty. The seat went through a couple of revisions, as well as cleaning up the wiring harness. We also welded a custom 4-1-2 micro muffler that you can see tucked under the belly of the bike.

Luke rode it around Boulder for just under a year, then when we both moved back to California he sold it for $1500.

A few months later when his summer break ended and he was back in Boulder he saw the bike again, although this time it had a disgusting seat and a terrible paint job covering the beautiful army green Yamaha tank. The dual pod headlights had also been replaced with a cheap bar light. And again a few months after that we saw the bike for the third and final time. It had been stolen, spray painted (even on the forks). The headlights were missing along with the gauge and a new massive dent in the tank

Custom two stroke race bike

KTM 250cc two stroke, CBR900RR front forks, Yamaha R1 rear shock. What’s not to love?

All hand bent tube hand tig welded tube steel frame built with the suspension geometry of the KTM RC390.

Honorable mentions

Luke’s first bike, his very custom Ninja 250 that lived at my house in boulder for a while. It started off as a big green machine before he ripped all the fairings off of it, reupholstered the seat, replaced the gauge and headlight and built a custom two into one under tail exhaust out of copper plumbing pipe from home depot.