Naked bikes? Help me understand.

Ok...so the big thing these days seems to be the "naked" look. I see guys taking decent looking bikes and ripping all the "smooth" stuff off to give it a different look.
Now I am not saying I am a trend setter by any means, but I have always managed to get myself on the front edge of all the new fads that come along. Some by choice, but most by just dumb luck.
I had show cars with flairs and ground effects packages that I made myself back in the early 80's. Then companies started coming along with bolt on aftermarket parts.
I did custom lighted interiors with neon and Led lights. That took off a few years ago and now comes in off the line production cars.
I custom painted cars with weird colors that are now very common.

So here is my thing. I am going back to the smooth fairing look . All built in parts, nice flowing lines and no corners on my bikes.
Am I just a few years ahead of the next trend, or so far behind the times that I am not even in the same race anymore?

Can someone please explain the draw to the naked look? I have nothing against it, in fact I think it's great when anyone customizes a machine, but I do have to say that all bikes were "naked" for the last 30 years. Why are we going back to that? Is it the whole retro thing?

No flames please. This is just a question to help me understand.

Peter

 

You put all this time and $ in the bike why cover it up. Im pritty big in to the british streetfighter seen, other than a belly pan and/or a head light fairing there r naked

 

Long story short, I originally wanted a mid-70's honda CB750. But after I realized that all of them were just out of reach in my price range, I decided to go for something else. Thats when I found my Seca2 (xj600) for extremely cheap and in good condition. Too good of a deal to pass up.

After riding it around for 3 months, I got to be annoyed with how the fairing vibrated so severely on the frame/mount/who-knows from 2k-4.5k rpms. No matter how much rubber I put between the bike and the fairing, it still vibrated.

So I looked into finding some stock xj600n (euro-version of my bike but stock naked) clusters to use cause the only clusters I could find that would work were like 2" in diameter...much too small to be useful.

Before I bought anything though, I removed the fairing just to make sure the vibrating noise went away and that I didn't mind the wind too much. So I rode without the fairing for 5 days or so and realized I was never putting the stock fairing back on.

After finally finding out that a FZR600 cluster (that looks freakin' sweet imo) works perfectly, I bought it. Within the next 3 days, I also bought a round 7" headlight and headlight ears.

Then yesterday I spent 4 hours installing everything, and then I took it out for a spin. Everything works perfectly, and I am extremely happy with the way it looks/sounds/feels now. I just have a few minor things left to do on the front end now to make it perfect.

But the way I see it is this. Its your bike. If you want to do something to it that will make you love your bike even more, do it! And even though I am still new to bikes, if I can find 1 more reason to take my bike out for a ride, I'm gonna do it. Besides, my bike was still so inexpensive that I could spend as much in mods that I paid for the bike, and I'd still have paid less than for a CB750.

Hope that helps a bit!

 

You know, I thought I was behind the times when I was still wearing my old bell bottom jeans. Turned out I was ahead of the next batch of kids!

You're probably ahead of your time.

Now if Hot Pants would just come back......

 

Cause naked is always better!

Plus its, cheaper when your bike falls over or when you get insurance. And you aren't in the crotch rocket category. :lol:

 

There is always going to be faired bikes out there, so they never went out of fashion. R1's, Busa's etc are all faired and look butt ugly without fairings. (well, Busa's look ugly regardless )

The only fad is some manufacturers brought out some naked big bores which encouraged the few already doing the streetfighter look.

Both will be around for years to come.

I like naked, always have and always will. If you play only at the speed limit then they are practical and look good. Maintenance is also a breeze without fairings. Simple oil change can be done in minutes rather than hours.

 

I believe I can explain .

The fad of customizing a bike/car/truck has been very big the last10 years. everywhere you look someones EGO is there in a sea of egos its hard to decern which is better over another. I call it ULTRA EXTREME EGOS

Where a guy like me i can be very happy with a clean "naked bike" with suttle mods like a paint job that i have designed myself which i call "silent screams'' which is a basic run of the mill retro look.

sometimes too much is too much.

K-I-S-S

"Keep It Simple Stupid" is my favorite saying

Carl I am waiting for the return of the original DAISY DUKES and HALTER TOPS 8O :wink:

 

My 2 cents.

I like the industrial look of the frame and motor.
It is cool seeing the working parts.

Nekked shows the muscle, dressed hides it all.

 

I think the streetfighter / naked bike trend really got it's start back in the mid 1980's, partially as a backlash to all the new, fully-faired sport bikes that suddenly enveloped the market. The manufacturers seemed to want to throw a faring and bodywork on just about any style of bike out there. Part of their reasoning was that with relatively inexpensive and easy to manufacture fairings covering the mechanical bits, they could eliminate the costs of styling and finishing the engine to a visually appealing level.

Another cause was the insurance industry and certain practices of the motorcycle manufacturers themselves. Unfortunately the manufacturers saw replacement bodywork as a high-margin profit center, jacking up the prices of the easily damaged body parts to absurd levels. When a faired bike was laid down, even though the damage was mainly cosmetic and very repairable, the insurance companies found it was usually cheaper to total the bike rather than repair it. Because the high rate of losses on faired sport bikes versus unfaired bikes, you started to see faired bikes being charged much higher prices for insurance, while an unfaired bike was still relatively reasonable to insure.

I know first hand of a friend who dropped his two month old Hurricane at low speed while he was pulling out of a sandy parking lot entrance. The bike was still mechanically perfect, and he picked it up and rode it home with one of the turn signals flapping in the wind. When the insurance company priced out the replacement faring and bodywork parts, they quickly totaled the bike. He demanded to buy the salvage back (in fact he refused to let the insurance company take possesion of the bike) and rode it sans farings until some of the aftermarket companies started producing more reasonably priced copies in fiberglass. Twenty years later he still owns and rides the bike. It has gone through the naked bike phase three times, twice due to being laid down and the last time because he got the itch to ride it while he was trying to put a show quality finish on a new paint job on the bodywork. I have seen this senario repeated time and time again.

The manufacturers finally figured out that there was a market for sophisticated sport bikes without all the expensive bodywork and started producing them.

 

Some of us like to be able to "see" the guts of the machine. It makes it easier to troubleshoot and work on, as well. This is a very important factor in a bike for me. For example, I can change both plugs on my Buell before you could even get access to one plug on, say, an XJ700NC. If you don't do your own wrenching, you probably don't care. But it makes a difference to me. Just my .02.

 

To those with fully faired bikes it still makes a difference.

Labour charge of four hours for an oil change usually includes about three hours of fairing removal/ replace. :wink:

 

One point everybody else seems to have missed is that fully faired bikes are uncomfortable to ride in Summer. I just sold my lovely GL1100 because in our climate I got too bloody hot sitting behind all that Tupperware!
(If British readers send me a PM I will explain "Summer" and "hot" for them)

 

Could be due to the fact that you can't go out and buy a standard bike in the US or Canada anymore... people create what they can't buy.

I do think that the trend for vintage race-style fairings will probably pick up a little bit... Personally I plan on helping it along. But not with my seca. She looks good in the buff. 8)