Harley-Davidson Hollywood Joe Wiggles a Modified Tail, Stock Softails Look Too Soft

The Milwaukee company introduced the Softail moniker in the mid-1980s in a bid to offer a line of rides that had the looks of a vintage hardtail machine but handled better and felt more modern. For all intents and purposes, it succeeded, and the name turned into a line of motorcycles that is still around, kicking and screaming just as powerful as ever.

The bikes using this frame have not only been godsent for customers but for custom shops as well, which immediately saw the immense potential for customization they were born with.

As a result, the present-day market is literally flooded with modified Softail rides, each unique and built to customer specifications. And here's another drop in this unending pool of aftermarket Softails, a motorcycle pompously called Hollywood Joe.

In its natural form the ride was born over at Harley-Davidson as a Street Bob. The American cruiser is often the target of modification, not necessarily because it's a bad bike as it comes off the factory floor, but because people kind of feel it could be a lot more than Harley allows it to be.

The Hollywood Joe is the work of German garage Thunderbike, a specialist in Harleys in general and Softails in particular. It is one of the several Street Bob projects the garage let loose over the past couple of months.

The main focus of the custom work was giving the ride a more distinct rear end in a bid to make the Softail even softer, as Thunderbike says. And that meant tampering with the triangular rear section and the hidden struts of the Street Bob, taking on the exact rigid frame look of the bike Harley is gunning for.

The owner of the Street Bob was particularly unhappy about the way the rear fender, clamped between the struts, kind of messed up the look of the rear, so he asked Thunderbike to do something about it. The result? Well, you can have a look at it in the attached gallery.

In a nutshell, the bike now sports something customizers call a swinging fender. That means no longer tying the part to the struts, but directly to the swingarm. This means the fender floats just millimeters above the wheel, moving up and down with the bike and making look like it's flying – hence the flying fender name bestowed upon this setup.

The fender has built-in turn signals of the Kellermann variety, and is accompanied on the back of the motorcycle by what appears to be a swinging saddle. Part of the Titanium range Thunderbike is making, the seat however rests on stiff springs "as not to interfere with the feedback between the rider and the rear suspension."

Using a flying fender may be the way to go if you want to embarrass stock Softails and their owners into feeling too soft, but it does come with a disadvantage: it takes the possibility of riding with a passenger completely out of the equation.

On the other hand, it does open the doors for some really nasty wheels to be installed. For the Hollywood Joe Thunderbike went for a set from a line called FLH.

The rear one is sized at 18 inches, significantly larger than the 16-inch piece offered from the factory floor, and is shod in a 200 mm wide tire. At the opposite end the standard 19-inch was replaced by a 21-inch wide wheel. Both pieces of hardware come with a black and shiny metal look.

The front end is the recipient of some modifications as well, and they are most visible in the form of the added pieces of hardware, especially the handlebars. Part of a range called Hollywood (hence the name of the custom project), they come with perforated struts to mimic the ones seen on the rear fender.

The front fork looks different, too, and that's owed to the fact that it was not only lowered but also had its standard chrome look in something called diamond-like carbon.

On a performance level Thunderbike didn't tamper that much with the stock Street Bob. We don't know exactly what model year the bike is, but the frame is equipped with the stock 114ci engine that was only gifted with a Dr. Jekill & Mr. Hyde exhaust system as an aftermarket piece.

It's unclear how much the entire conversion from Street Bob into Hollywood Joe costs, but even if this is described as a rather soft upgrade to the existing bike, the added parts and work conducted on it probably weren't cheap, and most likely bring to total cost of the ride to a much higher value than the $16,999 Harley is asking for one.