Crooked Motorcycles is a name worth watching on the custom scene in Europe. Just a couple of months ago, they impressed us with a crisp BMW K100 build that avoided the cookie-cutter ?flying brick? vibe. And they?ve now just released details of this intriguing Sportster street tracker.
You don?t often hear adjectives like ?sleek? or ?sharp edged? associated with the lovably chubby Sportster, but Crooked have absolutely transformed the V-twin icon.

Workshop founders Dominikus Braun and Jakob Müller have known each other since childhood times, when they zoomed around local fields on XT250s.
They started building customs together in 2015, and after a three-month odyssey around north Africa, formally set up the company in 2018. A third member of the crew, Anh, works part-time on the graphic design front.
?Umbra??meaning shadow?is based on an XL883 Hugger from 1995, a lesser-known Sportster variant that later became the ?Low? model. The compact ergonomics came from a different seat shape, shocks and bar setup.
The commission arrived from the founder of the battery company Intact, which has a high profile in Germany. He already owned the Sportster, and like Crooked, is based in Memmingen?a city about a hundred kilometers west of Munich.

?The client brief was to use different layers of black, and present the battery in style,? says Dominikus.
Visually, a stock Sportster obviously has little in common with the typical street tracker silhouette, so the Crooked team knew tha...