Despite its increasing popularity, the 1980s K-series BMW remains a difficult bike to customize. There’s hardly an inch of it that isn’t blocky, angular, or just plain awkward—so it takes a sharp eye and deft hand to massage it into a slick and cohesive café racer. Enter Chris Scholtka.
Based in Cottbus, Germany, Chris splits his time between his job as a firefighter and his after-hours custom bike-building endeavor, Motocrew. He cracked the code for building razor-sharp BMW K-series café racers a while ago, and he’s produced a handful of them since. But his latest build—a 1984 BMW K100 café racer—hits a little differently.
The project was commissioned by a friend who had found a 1984 BMW K100 that was in great shape and wanted it customized.…