Altered State
ALTERED STATE
A Guzzi once forgotten, now fine
UH, THERE’S A PROBlem,” the seller said to the prospective buyer of his 1987 Moto Guzzi SPII 1000. “The Guzzi’s in this garage, the door is locked and I’ve lost the key.”
Rodney Aguiar had not just driven three hours to turn around without at least seeing the bike.
“No big deal, I carry a crowbar for just such occasions,” he replied, and proceeded to extract the door from its hinges.
“Inside was the ugliest motorcycle I’d ever seen,” said Aguiar, “but somehow I fell in love in that dark back-alley garage.” The odd attraction cost him 15 Benjamins, and soon the shut-in Italian Twin was in his truck and headed south for a complete makeover.
Aguiar, a 35-year-old combustion junkie from Yorba Linda, California, has built everything from offroad race trucks to mobile oil-drilling rigs. More recently he’s been working on TV chopper projects with Roland Sands and Matt Hotch. His business, The Propulsion Laboratory, specializes in one-off fabrications of anything metal that moves.
Back at the Lab, Aguiar removed all of the M-G’s vital organs, leaving only a bare frame. After thorough examination, he found the Guzzi’s condition to be quite sound, a perfect platform for transforming the standardstyle SPII into “Rodneguzz,” a half-Rodney, half-Guzzi café special.
Alterations began with lopping off the rear subframe, which was shortened and lowered by a few inches before being fused back on.
A hand-crafted aluminum tailsection was then grafted into place over the framework. Front-end enhancement came by way of an inverted fork assembly taken from a 2004 Suzuki GSXR750. The shock and rear Brembo master cylinder are likewise Suzuki, originally on an ’04 Gixxer 1000.
Orange County Powder Coating and Plating applied a black-crinkle finish to the motor and transmission, while the frame was powdercoated semi-gloss black. The shortened, reshaped gas tank and seat cowl returned from Mike Maldonado’s paint shop in a glaring Ferrari Red. Seat padding consists of a gel base topped with foam and skinned in deerhide. Pro-Tec rearsets give boots a place to reside.
Three months of mental and metal bending beneath fluorescent lights yielded the bobtail café-racer you see here. By the time it was complete, every piece of the original bike beneath the gas cap had been massaged or manipulated in some way, shape or form. Rodneguzz has the same DNA as the 1987 donor bike, but you’d never recognize it.
Aguiar’s red-white-andgreen altered state of Italian reality is very small and easy to ride. At a stop, even short riders can easily reach the ground. The motor pulls smoothly from down low through the revs like transverse-Vees do. It rides, corners and stops better than any pre-Piaggio Guzzi, while still turning heads and sounding great.
Amazing what a good crowbar can get you into...
Mark Cernicky
