Written by Marlon Slack
Craig Rodsmith is one of my favourite characters in the bike building world. An Australian working in the US, his motorcycles are bombastic creations that feature incredible aluminium work. Miles of polished metal and astonishing levels of fit and finish are his calling card. But sometimes he likes to play it a little more simple. And he can do the understated stuff incredibly well too, as this 1976 Honda Goldwing café racer shows.

?This build actually started two years ago when a rather large bloke, (6?6? and about 320lbs) walked into my shop by chance,? Craig recalls. ?He started checking out some of the café racers I?d built and said that he?d always wanted one but was just too big for the typical café builds out there.? Ah, the curse of the tall man. They might reign supreme when the world falls apart and we start swinging swords at each other, but in the meantime finding a motorcycle is damn hard. But Craig had a solution.
?I happened to have a Goldwing ? the one I called the ?X-Wing? in the shop and suggested a café build around an early 1000cc spoke wheel Goldwing?. Those early ?Wings are proving hard to find, and they demand a premium when they do pop up. But the customer struck upon some luck. ?He said he was going to start looking for a donor and get back to me. As luck would have it he came back the next week with a pretty complete, low mileage 1976 model that hadn?t run in years.?

With the bike in the shop Craig started realising,...