“Who wouldn’t want to build a two-stroke Italian Harley?” asks Chris Tope, almost irreverently. “It’s the original Harley-Davidson Pan America!”
As the ‘Tope’ in Utopeia Moto Company in Texas, Chris is known for building offbeat scramblers stacked with quirky details. His signature style is easy to spot and hard to replicate—so when his latest customer came to him seeking a typical Utopeia machine, Chris had carte blanche.
Right off the bat, Chris knew what donor bike he wanted for the project. “I’m a sucker for two-stroke motors,” he tells us. “I’ve also never built a custom Harley-Davidson in my style, only repaired them.”
“So I told him I’d been wanting to build a Harley-Davidson Baja 100 for many years—and if he was alright with it, then that was the bike.…