You have to gauge your audience here. This is the #1 google search hit for cafe racer so we get A LOT of guys and girls who saw something cool and fashion-y and now want to jump a bandwagon. Motorcycle TV programming has been largerly chopper-centric for the last 10-15 years so for most that is their only frame of reference. The problem is that what works and is lauded in the chopper world does not work for the rest of motorcycling. Some of the often terrible misconceptions are:
- you need to start with as cheap a bike as possible. While this may work for a full boat custom where the only thing stock at the end is going to be the engine mounting points and you don't really care how it works as a motorcycle, the reality is a performance bike needs a solid base to start from and often you buy the previous owners work at a discount.
- you are a hero if you can bring an absolute piece of shit back from the dead - eh it's an admirable feat for sure but not what most noobs are up to and certainly not the path to instant gratification. It's also less impressive and less of a bragging right to people who value well maintained old bikes.
- Looks are everything. A chopper doesn't have to stop, handle all that well, or be comfortable. In fact the ones that seem to get the best press don't to any of those things well at all. It just has to look good and sell people on how you are the baddest mofo on the block. It is not the sum total definition of all custom bikes. Adventure bikes, dirt bikes, race bikes, and yes cafe racers are all bikes where their function defines them. It has to work well (or at least better than stock) first and foremost. Otherwise you are just building a differently shaped chopper. If you are doing it right, the bike will get you 85% of the way in the looks department anyway and what's left you can make aesthetic choices about. There is no such thing as an ugly race bike but there are plenty of ugly bikes pretending to be racers.
- there is some sort of scene, culture, etc....that you get access to just by having a "cafe racer". This is largely fiction. Every town has an old bike community, but not everywhere is it specific to one group like it is with the chopper community. cafe racers did not start and end with the english rockers in the 50's and 60's - IT went from the late 40's to 1992. Why 1992? because that is when the first generation of race replica sportbikes hit the used market and became affordable to the masses. Up until that point if you wanted to go fast on a motorcycle you had to build a fast motorcycle - there wasn't a showroom race ready darling. The guys I knew as a kid in the 80's who called themselves cafe racers rode late 70's/early 80's superbikes, idolized spencer, and lawson, cooley, and rainey, and took those big jap leg burners out for top speed runs at night down the highways. Every generation has it's own heroes and villains and it's own definition of things. A lot of the old timers I hang out with call production class racers cafe racers because the bikes are "technically" street legal. These are guys who saw the birth of the superbike era first hand. However, that kind of shit doesn't sell leather jackets and patches, and what not - but greased up 50's rockers do. Anybody who talks about being part of a culture and being connected to history has drank the kool aide and been sold a lifestyle by magazines and television. IF you look at the real heroes of performance motorcycling from the 50's till now - guys like Dick O'Brien, Don Vesco, Cook Neilson, Don Emde, Reno Leoni, Jimmy Adamo, Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey, and on and on and on none of them look like nancy boy english rockers - they just look like men on a mission.
The reality is that because this place gets inundated with the tragically stupid who are also unwilling to listen to good sound advice (because good sound advice never made anybody a hero) it is super important to give a proper introduction here about who you are. The advice changes depending on the audience and you don't know your audience until they tell you who they are. It is terribly presumptuous for people to think that just because a forum exists it is there merely to help them and their questions. Really forums exist for entertainment - very little good is actually done in this space. Sure it can help you think through a problem, and it's is nice to talk things out and get feedback but you get back what you put out.
There is no one answer. There is no instant gratification. In this hobby there are only bikes and the enjoyment that comes from riding them. Everything else is window-dressing.