The Triumph Tiger Cub was a 200 cc single-cylinder British motorcycle made by Triumph Motorcycles at their Meridenfactory. Based on the Triumph T15 Terrier 150 cc, itself a surprise announcement just before the 1952 show,[2] the 200 cc T20 Tiger Cub designed by Edward Turner and launched at the Earls Court show in November 1953[5] competed well against the other small-capacity motorcycles of the time, such as those using Villiers two-stroke engines. Source: Wikipedia
This 1963 T20 Tigercub have been purchased by us 3 years ago as part of our workshop decoration but only 1 year ago we decided that this bike deserved to be on the road again with a bit of Kerkus touch. It was not a complete bike at the beginning, with lots of rusted parts, fork and rear suspensions need replacement, broken seat, the famous skirt fender was still intact (not a fan of it…), original carb have been replaced & etc2. The engine to our surprise was still in good condition, but still need some minor tweaking.
We did a bit of a study on what can be done to this bike, and straight away fell in love with its scrambler/tracker style that have been done widely. We can see a potential lightweight street/town bike that can swerve around traffic jams and at the same time have much power on it.
So the build begins. As usual, the bike have been stripped down to its bare bone. Any unwanted brackets have been removed and the frame have been painted with gloss black PU paint. Engine was given a different treatment with polished engine casing and hi temp black paint on the engine block. The contact point cover was missing, so we commissioned Bigcat to replicate a new one using aluminum and decided to have a bit of fun by having our Kerkus logo etched on it. We knew that we needed the fork to be changed, and we were lucky enough there was a good condition Honda S90 fork laying around the garage, so we tried to fix it together and to our surprise, we love it.The fork have been replaced complete with triple 3 and front hub from the Honda S90. We fitted 18″spoke rims front and back with a pair of Swallow SB135 classic tires.
The seat have been replaced with a slimmer custom seat. The seat pan have been made in house while the upholstery was done by Hamdan Keramat. The rear fender have been replaced with a shorter custom made fender finish in gloss black and at the back, a new rear light have been installed together with the license plate. The rear height have raised by replacing it with a longer local brand suspension in chrome finish. The tank was also been given a new colour scheme. Well at first, it was a combination of dark grey & black, but we didn’t like it, so we repainted it to orange mustard on top with light grey at the bottom, thanks to Azizi Spray. It was perfect, with a Triumph logo on the side of the tank. The original tank pad have been teared into pieces, so we decided to make a new one using faux leather with a custom design.
We wanted the bike to have that tracker feel on it, so we decided to do an upswept exhaust system. Again, our good friend from Mansur Exhaust helped us out to do the job. They did a stainless steel manifold, and the muffler (original) painted in Hi-temp black to give some contrast. The aluminum exhaust cover was done by Bigcat and we loved the raw brushed finish on it. The handlebar was a bit challenging as we didn’t really know which type that can look perfect of it. We tried a wide tracker handlebar, but feels weird bout it. 1 night as we were discussing on it, we were standing beside a junk Yamaha YB100 and realised that this stock YB100 handlebar was pretty cool. It looks like a bmx handlebar and we quickly put it on to the Tigercub. We smiled and agreed. To match the handlebar, we put on a small gloss black headlight with yellow tint and painted the fork the same colour as the headlight.
Overall, we were quite happy with the finish product. This build did took us quite some time as we had to moved to 2 different garage earlier this year. But we determined to finish it because this bike really deserved to be back on the road again and hopefully will last for another 10-15 years down the road.
Cheers.
Like this:
Like Loading...
