A few years ago, if you met Efraon Triana in Madrid and asked him what he spent his days doing, he probably would have called himself a graphic designer, seeing as he’d started a company in the field, but over the years as he worked in a career that most would be content with Efraon eventually reached a point where he said “The hell with it,” deciding at that moment to approach life differently while reinventing his understanding of what it meant to make a living and how it could be done.
He’s not sure how he got to where he is today, and he’s had a pinball game of careers to reach this point (from cooking as a professional chef to the arts of advertising), but he’s always considered himself a craftsman, and so in keeping with his revised outlook on life he decided to focus his efforts on something that would allow him to follow a creative path on his own terms. What better avenue than motorcycles then, perhaps the ultimate symbol of mechanical freedom. He’s since made over 100 bespoke bike builds for his clients under the name UFO Garage, but he makes sure to leave some time and workshop space for his own pursuits too.
“There’s one motorbike that sets the benchmark for me. That’s the 1957 Sportster.” For those of us in the States, the brand name of Harley-Davidson is likely to evoke scenes of leather tassels and hyperbolic noise, but back in the ‘50s this was a different story. Harley had a racing past that was already pretty well established by this point, but the Sportster was a road bike built response to the company losing market share to the faster and cheaper offerings coming from England at the time, and 60 years after the fact the bike has proven its significance and is firmly set in the history of motorcycling. Efraon is just one man in the crowd of riders who’ve been charmed by the Sportster, and like so many of us who weren’t around when our favorite classic machines were not considered as such, he longed for the opportunity to walk into a showroom when they were new.
That’s obviously not an option these days, but his girlfriend suggested an alternative: why not build one on his own? He couldn’t think of a good reason not to, so he got to work.
Starting with a new bike to build on top of, Efraon set off on his project to recreate the Harley in his head. It would offer all of the modern performance and comfort of a contemporary bike—things like ABS brakes, fuel-injection, etc.—but the whole package would be wrapped up in the look of the original Harley that was built long before those amenities became standard fare. This involved an extensive amount of bespoke panel work to adapt the ’57 Sportster look to the larger frame of the new bike that would serve as the base for the sculpted tanks and fenders of the timeless original. He didn’t want the fit and finish to be anything but OEM quality, and the result of his hard work has lived up to his ethos: “Everything has to work in harmony.”
Drive (and Ride) Tastefully®
