Alright, the “Bought on Bike-urious” aspect is a bit of a stretch, but the bike is just so fantastic that I just have to share it. In July of 2017, I featured what I described as “one of the coolest airhead customs I’ve seen in a long time“. It started as a BMW R100GS Paris Dakar that the Canadian seller started modifying to tackle local logging roads with…then he forgot to stop farkling it. My buddy Gregor Halenda first saw the bike for sale here on Bike-urious, and it eventually ended up in his hands.
Photos by Gregor Halenda
How it looked when I featured it. (photo by original seller)
On the original post, Gregor noted: “Coolest airhead ever! Wow, that is tight. I’ve inherited my fathers GS and have been planning a build similar to this but with traditional bodywork/tank. I may rethink this because this ticks every box. I’d ride this all the time. Awesome.”
But Gregor didn’t buy the bike at first. Instead, it was acquired by a gentleman named Charlie, and I figured that would be the end of the story. But last February, I got an email from Gregor with a very simple title and a photo: “Recognize this?” Turns out he had stayed in touch with the buyer and snagged it for himself after the buyer was having some issues with oil burning and the title.
Admittedly, I didn’t remember that I had featured it in the past until Gregor reminded me!
Four months later, I was in Washington for the Yamaha Tracer 900GT launch, and I was given the opportunity to ride the bike back home to Los Angeles. My first stop was to see Gregor and his new project.
During my visit, the bike was disassembled to fix an electrical issue… (photo by me)
…but Gregor was able to get it all back together again to tackle a 500 mile dual-sport ride the next morning! (photo by me)
During my visit, Gregor had all sorts of ideas for what would be coming next, and I was excited to see how it would all turn out. The good news is, the bike was revealed to the public at The One Moto Show this past weekend so you can take a look for yourself. I highly recommend you check out this story on ADVRoad – it covers some of Gregor’s history and details about the work done to this bike:
“Perhaps the most significant change was to have Woody of Woody’s Wheel Works work with me to design a particular wheelset for the bike. We created true dirt set in his SuperLight / SuperLaced style using a 1.6×21 front wheel and a 2.15×18 rear with Excel A60 rims. The custom billet hubs separate the brake carrier from the wheel hub. The new rim design, being narrower, squeezes the tire together to make a very round profile. This increases its turn in speed and gives better compliance. Those rims allowed me to use the most aggressive tires I could find; Goldentyre’s GT723, their rally raid tire. I’m using the fatty front version in 90/100 and a rear of 140 width. To get such a massive tire to fit on the BMW the R1100GS swing-arm had to be completely cut apart, and I machined a new billet shock mount moving the mounting position in 1.5” / 3.8 cm to gain clearance. It took weeks, but we lost over 20 lbs / 9 kgs of unsprung rotating weight, and the bike feels like it lost 100 lbs / 45 kg when you ride it. The transformation was truly incredible.”
Gregor says he’s moving on to a new project next week, but somehow I suspect we haven’t seen the end of this custom R100GS.