First Look: ICON 1000 Iron Lung Project Bike

We’re not entirely convinced by the name of the bike, but Icon Motorsports has just revealed a really nice custom tribute motorcycle called the Icon 1000 Iron Lung.
The Portland-based company is well known for its motorcycle apparel and every so often builds a bike to underline and showcase a new range of clothing it is launching.
In this case, it’s created the Iron Lung, which is a retro-looking Harley-Davidson Sportster, for the Spring 2014 launch of its ICON 1000 Collections.

ICON 1000 Iron Lung profile

The term Iron Lung to us is a colloquial name for a medical ventilator, used in the distant past, which allows a person to breathe when normal muscle control has been lost through illness or an accident.
That aside, ICON says this particular Sportster sat around for a few years before it decided to do something interesting with it. The design brief was to try and replicate Harley-Davidson endurance and circuit racers from the 1970s and the finished result is this good-looking bike called the Iron Lung.

ICON’s Sportster started life as an 883cc model but was up-rated using a big bore kit to 1200cc, along with a Supertrapp exhaust system and features H-D Wide Glide forks and custom made triple clamps.

ICON 1000 Iron Lung tank

Because the front end of the Iron Lung has been lowered and widened, ICON had to fabricate a sub frame and they used Progressive 970 shocks on the rear and the Iron’s one-off fairing was designed and built in-house.

The wheels are from a H-D Vrod with hand painted details done by Garage 31 and the custom designed seat was made by another Portland company – New Church Moto.

Judging by the film that ICON has made of the Iron Lung it’s definitely not all show and no go and has been ridden hard. Full marks for ICON for admitting that when it first tested the bike, during the initial build, it burst into flames and had to be quickly rebuilt.


ICON 1000 Iron Lung - A Harley Davidson Sportster Custom from ICON 1000 on Vimeo.
She was an accident waiting to happen. 600 pounds of American coke fired iron, riding on weather-checked English rubber. Cracking femurs or rupturing internal organs were her specialties, and she had done so on more than one occasion. The Iron Lung, a 1991 Harley Sportster road-racer, was a vision of what never was, in response to a question that was never asked.

See more of her at http://icon1000.com/bike/iron-lung/

The original article appeared in rideapart.com