My 1980 HD Sportster

[JPG1911]

Last June I was able to help out a friend who needed to put some cash together quickly. He sold me his 1980 Harley Davidson Sportster 1000 XLH for a song. The bike had been stripped down and rebuilt and modified by my friend and his father(who owned a Harley shop in Va at the time) in 2000. They put about 4000 miles on the bike over the next few years, and it was parked in a shed in 2007 and forgotten about.

By the time I found out about the bike, time and chlorine fumes had taken their toll - the shed which housed the bike for 7 years also happens to be a pump house/pool shed full of pool chemicals

Here is a pic of the bike from the first time I saw it


Every bit of chrome on the bike was flaking, rusted, or gone. All of the aluminum bits were heavily oxidized and/or pitted. Every surface that didn't have good paint left on it was rusted. This was going to take some doing.

Undaunted, I picked the bike up and took it to a good friend's house to begin resuscitating it in his garage. Here she is with the first layer of dust wiped off


I didn't care one little bit about the chrome and paint. I planned from the get-go to achieve the "murdered out" look and paint mostly everything black - I have nothing against shiny bikes, they're just not for me.

Taking stock of everything, I decided to focus on getting the bike running and riding before cosmetics. There would be some things that got sanded and painted along the way, simply because I had to remove them anyway, but the plan was to get it running and ride as much as I could before it got cold, then strip it down over the winter and paint or powder coat everything and make some modifications. On the day I got the bike, I drained and refilled fluids, put new spark plugs in it, poured seafoam in each gas tank, hooked it up to my truck with jumper cables, sprayed a little starting fluid in the carb, and got her to fire right up! Unfortunately, that was the most action the bike saw for a few more months. I took stock of everything that was needed, and as is usually the case, it was a lot more than I had originally planned on. I began to order and collect parts as my budget allowed. It was late fall/early winter before I was able to get enough items together to really do anything to the bike.


The tires were badly cracked and dry rotted, so they were the first major item to be replaced. I decided to attempt replacing them myself. I am very familiar with replacing car and truck tires, and have used many different tire machines, but replacing motorcycle tires with nothing but a set of spoons proved to be quite a task! I successfully replaced the front tube and tire by myself, but no matter what technique I tried, I could not get the back tire off the rim. I eventually gave up and cut the tire off with a sawzall. The inside of the rim was badly rusted. I spent 4-5 hours scouring the inside of it with a rotating brass brush chucked into my drill, various types and grits of steel wool, scotch-brite, and sandpaper. My initial plan was to sand blast the rims and paint them, but I couldn't find anyone with a blast cabinet big enough to handle the wheels, and the only local shop that does it wanted way too much money for their services.

We did not have a proper motorcycle lift or jack, so we had to get creative when removing wheels




By the time I got around to replacing the tires, I had sanded and painted many items with either black plastidip, or hi-heat flat black BBQ paint. I also installed some 12" rise mini ape hangers and a new bar clamp.

The transition from motorcycle to "Murdercycle" had begun.

That's all for now. I will update this thread more as time allows. I still have some pics to find and upload to photobucket, and lots more of the process to share. She is a continual work in progress, and I am happy to share the progress here!

In the next post, I will detail all of the modifications made to the bike before she came to live with me, and how she got saddled with her current identity crisis - is that a Sporster, or a FLH???