On November 18, 2022, Harley-Davidson rolled the last air-cooled Sportster ever to be built off their assembly line in York, Pennsylvania. The announcement marked the end of an era in the motorcycling world; a book-end for the iconic everyman?s V-twin that had been in constant production since 1957.
While the total number of Sportsters in existence is now officially capped somewhere well into the tens of millions, the death of the Evo comes with a silver lining: with obsolescence comes street cred.

Few understand this as well as Sydney, Australia?s Zen Motorcycles. They’ve turned this 2015 Harley-Davidson Sportster Seventy-Two into a reliable daily driver, with all the classic cool of an old ironhead. All that?s missing is a kickstarter (if you know where to look, of course). This build started when a client approached Zen asking for a 70s-style chopper, with modern performance and reliability. An abundance of chrome was high on the priority list too, but everything else was largely left up to the Zen crew. A late-model Sportster Seventy-Two was sourced as the ideal starting point.

Work smart, not hard, as they say. Harley first introduced the Seventy-Two back in 2012, and both the name and style were meant to invoke the 70s-era chopper craze of the time. Included in the factory package was the classic 2.1-gallon peanut tank that still lives on the bike today, as well as a full suite of factory chrome options, including the engine, wheels, and shocks.
This laund...