Custom Spotlight: Thunderbike’s Bad King

By Buck Manning, Photos courtesy of Thunderbike, Content courtesy of Barnett HD

What do you do if you really want the practicality of a Harley-Davidson Road King, but you find the MotorCo stocker sitting on a dealer’s floor just a little too goody-two-shoes for your taste? Well if you’re Andreas Bergerforth and you just happen to be the owner of the dealer’s floor it’s sitting on and you have an in-house custom service capable of building world-class winning customs, you just roll it right back to the boys and let the magic begin. Black magic that is, in the case of his personal bagger called Bad King.

Andreas’ Thunderbike Harley-Davidson dealership in Hamminkeln, Germany is not your average dealership with a few accessorized bikes and maybe a production custom or two lying around. It’s home to the 2006 and 2008 European Championship winners with a second (2006) and fifth place (2008) in the AMD World Championship along with a slew of other awards too numerous to mention. Not too shabby Andreas!

The platform for Bad King started out as a good old baseline 2008 FLHR, but not for long. Engine-wise, Andreas left the H-D internals alone while he replaced the exhaust with a set of black duals by Hooker Headers and a stylized Thunderbike air cleaner. Oh, there was one other change from the standard chrome-laden Twin Cam, a major engine blackout with the numerous bolt heads and cylinder fin edges providing a bit of raw metallic contrast. Sparkle is apparently not part of Andreas’ definition of bad.

Continuing that lack-of-sparkle theme are a set of Thunderbike’s own (designed-and-built by Thunderbike) slender-spoke wheels with a 23″ up front and an 18″ out back. They’re paired with a set of Thunderbike’s wheel-matching rotors, front and rear, to give the stock H-D calipers something new to bite on. The FL front fender was modified to fit the bigger wheel and ends up with a much sportier profile. The King of Choppers and now possibly baggers too, Arlen Ness, supplied the rear fender and saddlebag extensions. Sitting behind those bags is a set of way-bad-and-lowered, high-tech Bitubo spring shocks (featuring adjustments for pre-load, compression, and rebound damping) that replaced the stock air units. Andreas dropped the fork to match and a stance with a bad attitude keeps everything on the down-low.

Making a good king bad requires other attitude adjustments and a set of Thunderbike-fabricated bad-boy apes goes a long way in bringing out the inner bad boy. Thunderbike built a set of floorboards that uniquely caters to both driver and passenger in one Mad Max-worthy fashion statement with just the right touch of danger. Taking it all the way to the dark side, Ingo Kruse of Kruse Design (www.kruse-design.de) finished the transformation with a satin black top coat on just about everything he could find from tip to toe along with a stealthy, but subtle flame job that really puts the bad in Bad King, but in a really good bad way.

Check out an entire gallery of Thunderbike’s Bad King over at Barnett HD