Remembering Dyna — Custom Harley-Davidson Street Bob
With the Harley-Davidson Dyna family dead and buried, we thought we’d take a look back at the last Dyna Street Bob our team built with The Motor Company. We completed this build a few months back with our sister brand motorcyclecruiser.com and thought you all might want to feel a bit nostalgic today.
I had the idea to build this Street Bob in the beginning of the 2017, and the result is just what I had pictured in my head. Starting off, this is a 2016 Harley-Davidson Street Bob, which is a part of the now-retired Dyna family. When we first got it, it was gold flake with H-D’s standard chrome 2-into-2 exhaust system and had mini apes installed. I am 6-foot on the dot and the handlebars were not comfortable for me, making my feet and legs uncomfortable with the mid-foot controls, which I normally prefer over forward controls. So I ordered a ton of parts for the thing and couldn’t be happier with the outcome.
Starting off with ergonomics, I ditched the mini apes and replaced them with Harley’s Hollywood Handlebar paired with its 4-inch straight risers. This was a much more comfortable position for my arms and made the mids feel much better. The aesthetics of the bar and riser setup isn’t bad either! I really dig the look of that bar with a decent riser underneath. For hand and foot controls we installed H-D’s new Defiance line to help the flow of contrast pieces already on the bike. We ditched the shocks and slapped on a nice blacked-out set of the Emulsion shocks to help with the ride, which they definitely did, but they still left me wanting more.
Of course, you can tell right away we ditched the 2016 gold flake paint job and replaced it with a paint scheme new to 2017, the Charcoal Denim/Black Denim kit. I really dig the aesthetic balance on the gas tank between the charcoal and the sweep of black.
I decided to do just a moderate amount of performance upgrades to the Street Bob. I installed the Stage I kit from H-D using its high-flow air cleaner and I did a bit of cross-referencing for the exhaust. I love a good 2-into-1, but the only one that Harley had was the Dyna Switchback. So I ordered the head pipe and all mounting brackets from the stock Switchback and paired it with the Screamin’ Eagle Nightstick muffler. Everything bolted right up easy as pie with the exception of the head pipe if you are rocking mid-controls. If you have forwards, the head pipe wouldn’t make contact, but it does with the mids. I was not willing to give up the 2-into-1 or the mids, so a little grinding of the mid peg mount and we had clearance.
I went with black header wrap instead of the heat shields just to change up the look a bit more, the right call in my opinion. We used a full kit to wrap the head pipe from DEI and I painted the header before wrapping using VHT Header Paint. Just to add a bit more I went ahead and installed Screamin’ Eagle’s Performance Spark Plugs for stock compression along with its 10mm Phat spark plug wires.
We will miss the Dyna family but are very much excited to start building one of the new Softail models. The folks who have actually test ridden the new Softails sing their praises, and the new Softail Street Bob shines bright in the mix of the newly released Softail lineup. Happily we are in the works to start on a Street Bob project soon, so stay tuned for that!
