On paper, the Kawasaki KZ440 LTM made lots of sense when it hit the scene in 1980. It had a disc brake up front, cast wheels, an electric starter and that all-important Japanese reliability. All in all, it had the makings of a great street bike.
But life doesn’t happen ‘on paper.’ In the real world, riders buy with their hearts more than their heads, and if you saw a bone-stock Kawasaki KZ440 LTD in the wild, you’d grimace and turn the other way. It’s not especially good-looking.
It takes a special custom shop to see past ugly first impressions to the beauty that lies beneath. A special shop like Sabotage Motorcycles in Marrickville, just south of Sydney, Australia. When a customer approached shop founders Giles and Andy to turn his beat-up, neglected KZ440 LTD into a café racer, the boys had other ideas…
“The first challenge was to turn the client’s initial brief from a café racer on a cruiser base, to something more suitable to the bike’s frame geometry,” says Giles.…