Vintage Motorcycle Shop. Customs & Restorations.
Rawhide Cycles is your one-stop shop for vintage Japanese motorcycle repair, restorations, customs, choppers, engine rebuilding, performance upgrades, electrical overhauls, fabrication or anything you need related to your vintage motorcycle. We are dedicated to keeping your bike on the road and the wind in your face. We are a full service motorcycle shop specializing in pre-1979 Hondas. We also service other select model vintage motorcycles. This is the best shop not to take your new bike. Brandon Wurtz was born into a family of race car, hot rod and motorcycle builders. He spent the last 6 years learning the trade and the life, as an apprentice under master vintage Honda mechanic Charlie O'Hanlon. Living and working in San Francisco and Los Angeles, he developed his skills while studying the work of Honda founder, Soichiro Honda. The dream of opening his own shop and following the footsteps of Mr. Honda all the way back to the days of studying European motorcycles in the 1950's brought Brandon and his family back to his hometown of Boise, Idaho to start Rawhide Cycles. Rawhide Cycles - Est. 2016
Hi, I'm Brandon from Rohite Cycles. I'm going to introduce a bike that we just built and part we started manufacturing. This is a 1981 Yamaha XS650 and we just started making electronic ignitions that are 100% made in the USA for all XS650s from 1970 to 1984. On the left side of the bike here, I'll show you where that part is. It replaces the factory points and condenser and it's under this plate here where the point plate and the points would typically be. And that's our part. So what you see are two independent pickups here that are each adjustable. So you can set your timing just So the bike starts easily, runs great at all RPMs. The great thing about this part is that once you set your timing, you shouldn't have to ever set it again. It's triggered by a magnet in this rotor which uses the stock mechanical advance. And you can see that still turns just So that you get the same performance in your best scenario, best case scenario with points, plus more consistency. So you get a lot more of a consistent amount of power going to the coils and it will always be the same. Which makes the idle a lot more steady and it makes acceleration and higher revs a lot more strong. I'm going to show the startup sequence on this bike. The motor is totally cold. You can see I've got my hands on the pipes and the head. It was started a couple hours ago but it's cooled down since then. So I'm going to turn on the gas. My pet cox over here, key switch is here. And kick it over. And you can see even when it's cold, the idle is pretty low and very steady. These bikes, as they warm up, the idle comes up and that's adjustable right here as most of So as it warms up, I'll turn it down a little bit but I've got it set to where it would just idle when it's cold. And then I'm going to take it for a little test ride so This is the fresh engine rebuild. So I'm going to take it a little easy. But you can see as I stand it up, the idle comes up a little bit. And I'll adjust it later. So I'm going to turn it down a little bit. And then I'm going to take it for a little test ride.
