Meet Hardley, A Custom Harley Davidson from Revival Cycles

In a former life Hardley was as a Harley Davidson Sportster 883, but now she, um, hardly looks or behaves like one. Naming puns aside, there's so much innovation going on with the latest build from Austin's Revival Cycles that you probably won't see a better custom Harley for the remainder of 2014.

They felt the original bike was a combination of heavy and underpowered, which made it somewhat less than desirable. So they chucked, well, almost all of it. The engine was torn down and put back together using only Harley's best bits, so it now has a nice, even 100 hp. They took so much off of the bike that it's now a full hundred pounds lighter, too. In short, Hardley can scoot.

The story of Hardley goes way deeper than performance, though. Just as Caesar divided Gaul into three parts, so have the guys at Revival, but instead of writing a boring book you had to read in high school, they've ingeniously used the space to save room elsewhere. The left half is for fuel, but the right rear quarter is for oil, and directly in front of that is a section built specifically to hold nearly all of the bike's electronic systems.

What you get is an aesthetic without any clutter, and you can focus on some of the bike's other features, like this absolutely gorgeous exhaust that's been welded together section by section. Revival claims that the end result of all their hard work is a bike that sounds just as awesome as a Harley should sound on a highway, but that's also eerily quiet at a stop light... at least by Harley standards.

After ensuring that Hardley looks the part, sounds the part, and certainly has the power, they set about making her handle, too. That meant completely replacing the front and rear suspension, making almost an entire new frame from scratch, and then figuring out how to make it all work. They actually had to fabricate a special belt tensioner to prevent any slack in the drive belt that you're looking at in this shot.

The last thing you'll ever want is for something to slip on a bike this beautiful.


Aaron Miller is the Rides editor for Supercompressor. He sucks at welding, but has been around enough quality fabricators to recognize quality when he sees it. This is it. Follow him on Twitter.