Hot Dock Stg Nautilus
Hot Dock StG Nautilus
A custom that's 20.000 leagues above the competition
PAUL DEAN
WHEN MOST PEOPLE dream of custom motorcycles, visions of fictional submarines and WWII Nazi assault rifles don't dance in their heads. Matter of fact, few people likely conjure those kinds of mental pictures under any circumstances. But Keiji Kawakita evidently is not at all like most people, because those are precisely the kinds of images that clunk around in his brain. Which not only helps explain why his awardwinning custom looks like no other but also why he gave it the unusual name of StG Nautilus.
Kawakita is owner, operator and creative mastermind of Hot Dock, a small but enterprising custom-bike shop in Tokyo, Japan. Last year, he was one of 50 builders from around the world invited by S&S Cycle to create one-of-a-kind customs to help that Viola, Wisconsin, manufacturer of V-Twin performance equipment celebrate its 50th anniversary. The collection of spectacular motorcycles that resulted was breathtaking, to say the least. But after the dust cleared and the votes were tallied, Kawakita’s imaginative creation was declared the overall winner of that competition.
Inspiration for his atypical V-Twin custom came from several sources, but two in particular. Kawakita is a huge fan of Jules Verne’s classic movie, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and is especially fond of the submarine in that film, the Nautilus. He also counts guns among his numerous other addictions, one of his favorites being the Sturmgewehr 44, commonly referred to as the StG44, an assault rifle developed in Germany during the Second World War. So, when tasked with naming his custom, he paid homage to those iconic artifacts by calling it StG Nautilus.
Kawakita’s fascination with those same mechanisms also inspired bits and pieces of the bike’s design. His extensive use of rivets is reflective of the 19th-century style of submarine construction that influenced Verne’s depiction of the Nautilus. The ribbing on the oil tank and a few select pieces of hardware exhibit overtones of a Sturmgewehr 44. And the configuration of the quick-release mount at the rear of the gas tank was modeled after the barrel-change and bolt assemblies of another German machine gun, the MG42.
Actually, Kawakita’s custom contains many other design elements stimulated by his unbridled enthusiasm for a wide range of visual elements. The back end of StG Nautilus, for example, is shaped very much like that of a speedway racebike. The ingenious hardtail frame built by Kawakita comprises aluminum tubes pressed, riveted or welded into aluminum lugs, almost Tinkertoy-like. The single front downtube is beautifully curved to match the contour
of the front wheel, and Kawakita-having once been a racer himself-eschewed the usual custom/chopper kicked-out fork for much more rational and sensible front-end geometry, settling with a 27-degree fork rake. “I wanted it to look like old-style motorcycle frame,” said Kawakita, a man of few words and limited English but boundless creativity.
Even the engine, a 93-inch S&S Shovelhead-style V-Twin, was given a unique custom treatment. Although it clearly is an overhead-valve pushrod engine, it looks like a dohc motor thanks to custom rocker boxes built by Kawakita. With their four-bolt design and external oil lines, they closely resemble the cam housings on some of Honda's legendary racebikes of the 1960s, bikes that Kawakita has long admired. "They are my design but like the Honda RC-161, RC-171 and RC-172 GP racers," he says. And no carburetor for this big Twin; the engine is delivered combustibles by a custom-built electronic fuel-injection system. Kawakita made all the hardware for the system and developed the programming for the ECU, which was built by a friend who's a computer whiz.
Kawakita takes great pride in the fact that aside from the basic engine, transmis sion and tires, he built just about everything else. This includes the gas tank, oil tank, complete exhaust system, gauges, foot and hand controls, handlebar, triple-trees, even the 21-inch wheels. The fork is an old Telesco GP assembly that he heavily "remodeled," to use his description, and the single-piston disc brakes at both ends are entirely of his design. "They are my brand," he says, "that I call Nacht-Jaeger" (German for "night-fighter," though Kawakita translates the term as "Dark Iron"). The brakes, the rocker cov ers and several other Kawakita-designed products are available for sale through Hot Dock's website, www.hot-dock.co.fp.
"I take three months to design this bike," says Kawakita, "and four months to make it. But production was very pleasant. I like making scale models, and StG Nautilus was like making a 1-to-i (full-scale) model."
When asked to place a value on the bike, Kawakita paused for a while before slowly saying, "Uhh, umm, maybe $1 50,000"-then laughed and yelled an exuberant "yee-haw!"
Apparently, humor is also among Kawakita's many pas sions, so it's hard to know for certain if he was serious about that price. But one thing is for sure: Whatever its value, StG Nautilus is one of the most original and imaginative custom motorcycles you're likely ever to see.
