After 10 months of intense work, Malaysian Kenny Yeoh of Kenstomoto is back with the Kenstomoto Valkyrie, a long, low and sleek custom build reminiscent of Akira’s machine from the manga and anime. Shown to paultan.org ahead of the 2018 Art of Speed (AoS) at Malaysia Agro Exposition Park, Serdang (MAEPS), the Valkyrie is on display at the show’s Invitational Bike Build-off 2018.
As Kenstomoto’s first full custom build, where the frame and rolling gear are unique to the bike, the Valkyrie comes with a single-sided front swingarm, and a 240/45 17-inch rear tyre mounted on a 9-inch wide, eight-stud steel wheel. Taking a standard 2012 Kawasaki Er-6n parallel-twin engine, Yeoh fabricated a completely new frame to house it.
Exhaust exits through two straight pipes just in front of the rider and we can vouch for the fact the Valkyrie is loud. Inside the cockpit is a push-button start and the instrument gauge is a Daytona Bologna 80 unit from Japan, who also supplied the switches.
Taking the low rider ethos to the extreme, the Valkyrie’s frame puts the ride a mere 500 mm off the ground. Ground clearance, as can be expected, is measured in millimetres, in this case some 70 mm.
What will grab the viewer’s attention is the sheer length of the bike, which comes in at 2.89 metres, from tyre tip to tyre tip. A surprising statistic is the weight of the Valkyrie, which is about 200 kg, making it something of a lightweight in the world of custom machines that could be sometimes used as boat anchors.
The steering on the Valkyrie is rather special, with its welded swingarm structure. In the past, bikes with single-sided front swingarms used a Heim joint setup for centre-hub steering but the Valkyrie used a cable-operated system.
Yeoh says he uses a twin cable system instead of hydraulics or linkage for the sake of simplicity. The drawback of using such a system, he says, is the rake angle will change when the front wheel is turned to the left or to the right.
“The Valkyrie is a custom show bike, so I was not too concerned about the practicality of the handling as yet,” says Yeoh. “But the next version of the Valkyrie will probably use a parallel linkage system to avoid bump steer,” he continued.
Front wheel braking is with a custom Arlen Ness 380 mm diameter full-floating brake disc with a Brembo four-piston calliper taken from a BMW S 1000 RR. At the back is a 220 mm brake disc mounted on a Ducati 916 single-sided hub, with the rigid rear end modified to suit.
Finished in Matte Candy Red with Titanium accents, the Valkyrie is styled after the giant fighting robots from Japan, called Gundam. This includes graphics on the 90/90 21-inch front wheel with the Kenstomoto logo and a ’09’ to denote a fictional squad number.
Yeoh had a very stressful time building this bike, with work starting shortly after last year’s edition of the AoS. “The process was sheer insanity. I was working on the Valkyrie day and night, alongside a parallel build of the Azimuth. I don’t I want to do this again,” Yeoh says with a laugh.
The Valkyrie is not a new idea for Yeoh, with the germ of the thought taking root inside his head from way before he started building customs. “I took the clamshell riding position of a “future” bike, and wanted to mate it with a half mechanical, half organic look,” he says.
