What amazes me most about all these cafe racer building YouTube videos is this: the results so frequently demonstrate how little thought went into the end product. I'm not exactly an aesthetic, but it pains me to see so much effort put into a project that in the end simply looks drug-induced.

Motorcycle manufacturers, especially the Japanese, completely engineer every aspect of their motorcycles in more sigificant ways than we realize. Every component is designed to fit and work in its context and at its specific load and stress, amazingly perfectly and precisely harmonious with the other parts. When a person starts to modify these parts, whose design did not include margins for variations in applicability, the result is glaring, offensive, starkly out of place. The parts veritably scream a message of victimhood.

What's worse is the extreme focus bike "builders"--the phrase grates on me--put on the modified look, the stripped down, hacked up, flat black painted appearance, while shamefully ignoring mechanical best practice. Not only does the machine overall look like a bad dream, but its steering bearings are loose, its drive chain misadjusted, worm drive hose clamps and Allen screws adorn it, its brake and electrical systems are badly assembled, and most ironic of all, it often runs like crap. I just watched a video of a completed bike whose engine was so out of adjustment it sounded like a cement mixer and barely idled. It's not that hard to get an inline four tuned properly, but it is apparently out of reach for cafe racer advocates.

Violence indeed.