“So we sorted out his bike and when he came in to collect it, he saw a Harley Sportster chopper we had built for another customer and he decided that he wanted a new bike with something similar and in a classic, ‘70s style. “The job came about when a new customer, Tony, wandered into the shop with a custom chopper he had bought at auction asking us to get it running properly,” continues Bruce. “The search for the right space took a lot longer than we anticipated and so did coming up with a name for the shop, however we managed to find both and Zen Motorcycles was opened in March 2022 in Sydney’s Alexandria. “The idea for Zen Motorcycles was to have a shop that could build custom bikes for customers, service bikes to the high standards that our customers expected and also become a retailer of electric motorcycles,” says Zen’s Bruce Crerar. When you look up “chopper” in the encyclopedia… Right on cue and as if to prove a point, here comes Sydney’s Zen Motorcycles and their chopped 2015 Harley Davidson Sportster Seventy-Two. And right now it almost seems as if choppers are on the ascendancy and it does really look like cafe racers have run their course for the time being. They were just too entrenched and – let’s face it – too damn cool to die just yet, so they continued on doing what they do so well. Of course, the older and wiser of us knew that in some form or another choppers would always be around. All things rightly or wrongly assigned to history’s trash bin. Flares, beehive hair-dos and chest hair…and choppers. Representing the exact opposite of the light, fast and above all European essence of cafe racers, it was all too easy to judge them as yesterday’s news and maybe even write them off all together. Back in the Noughties, when cafe racers were all the rage and the global custom scene went through a renaissance of sorts, it was easy to see choppers as a dinosaur-style of bike.
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