'05 Revolution Manufacturing's Bobber - The Turbo Bruiser

The bike industry has been getting bigger and bigger every day. If you are the average guy in the market for a bike, just one day of searching around could get you so overwhelmed with different shops and styles that they all start to look the same. If you are the lucky few that already know and like one style of bike, you have half the battle won. Then you just need to find a shop that can build it for you.

The bobber, aside from experiencing a craze in full swing, is also the hardest style of bike to change the look of-well, for the most part, they are stock length, not stretched out or up, and they tend to be little hardtails with springer front ends and some retro paint. As far as the motors go, they come in all sizes and types from the knuckle to the Evo; hell, we have even seen a Twin Cam squeezed in a little rigid frame. So how can you get your bobber noticed? Well, it starts with the paint and then comes down to the motor.

Mike Kamalian, owner of Revolution Manufacturing out of Marietta, Georgia, has been building cool little bobbers called Little Bruisers, properly named for what they can do to your body. They are hardtails with big-inch motors and lots of power, so after a long ride you might feel a little bruised, but they're fast as hell.

One day at a show, a guy came over to buy a Bruiser and asked Mike, "Is that all you get when it comes to the power plant?" It got Mike to think about changing up the next Bruiser he was building at the time. He was already using 100ci RevTech motors in all the Bruiser bike builds, but was that enough? No way. An idea came to Mike after he did some work on his car that just happened to have a turbo tucked under the hood. He called RC Components as a result and ordered one of their Garrett T26 turbo kits.

Now Mike needed to build the Bruiser. He has been building these bobbers for over three years now, so the bike was mocked up and painted in no time. He started with a Santee frame with a rake of 36 degrees and 2 inches added to the backbone. Mike widened the rear to handle a 180mm tire out back, then had a set of 80-spoke wheels with billet hubs and pearled spoke laced up. Next he placed them in the proper place in the frame to make a roller.

A conventional oil tank did not give it the "look" that Mike desired, so he added a round oil tank from CCI under the seat and dropped the battery under the RevTech six-speed transmission. A set of drag bars were made in-house and attached to the springer front end, another pre-req for the bobber. Now for the motor, a standard RevTech 88ci mill, polished of course, was lying around the shop with no place to go and looked good. The turbo kit arrived a couple of days later. But could Mike leave it alone? No way. The Garrett T26 turbo was ported and flowed, and then ceramic ball bearings were added. The exhaust was handmade and ceramic coated, and Mike kept the internal wastegate as is. A modified S&S Gcarburetor was used with a velocity stack to gulp up as much air as possible. Then the wastegate was set at 15 pounds so that it would hit just when it was needed.

As for the color, one of Mike's favorite soft-drinks is root beer (well, that's what he said), so why not use that color. The frame and all the sheetmetal was sent over to Al the painter, where it was covered in a base coat of gold, then covered in mini-flake Root Beer Brown. He then added some cream white accents to break it up a bit. When he was asked about the number 14 on the side of the oil bag, Mike said, "It is my lucky number," but he also figured since everyone was putting 13's on their bikes, he would just one-up them. The bike was assembled as fast as the bike, just so Mike could get his speed freak on.

The bike was not a let down; the hardest part was getting through the break-in miles. Soon after the first 500 miles or so, Mike was unable to hold back his right hand as it twisted though, then the motor opened up and let the power out. Well, as the boost hit, so did Mike's ass right to the fender. The power was more than he had hoped for from this little Bruiser. Now all he needed to do was find that guy from the bike show to shut him up.