Building a café racer with an older motorcycle usually involves two phases; getting the bike running, and customizing it. And if the bike is really beaten up, the first phase can be the hardest—especially if the engine is too far gone.
Marshall Hewitt had a novel approach to this particular challenge. This ex-police 1991 BMW K100 was a true basket case when he found it, with a seized engine among the myriad issues that needed attention. So Marshall side-stepped the problem entirely, by simply yanking the engine out and replacing it with a modern electric powertrain.
An automation engineer by trade, Marshall has been building café racers as a hobby for a few years now. He normally works on bikes with internal combustion engines, but he’s not averse to trying new things.…