Roland Sands Yamaha Bolt Street Tracker

RSD Yamaha Bolt Street Tracker

The new Yamaha Bolt is a 58ci aircooled V-twin with bobber styling aimed right at the Harley-Davidson Sportster (see this recent Cycle World comparison test). As part of its rollout strategy, Yamaha shipped Bolts to a number of America's top custom bike shops to see what builders would do with it.

Among those prominent builders is pro roadracer turned custom bike designer and builder Roland Sands of Roland Sands Design (RSD) in Southern California. The street tracker you see here is his answer to Yamaha. Sands saw the Bolt as an natural conversion to the street tracker he'd been wanting to build for a while. He says that off the showroom floor the Bolt is lighter and better-handling than the Sportster.

Sands made surprisingly few changes from stock. There are the 19" Sun gold-anodized Sun wheels laced-up by Buchanan's Spoke & Rims of Azusa, CA and shod with Dunlop flattrack tires. A fiberglass seat assembly was designed and fabricated at RSD, as was a custom stainless steel exhaust system with carbon fiber tip. The stock handlebars and risers were replaced with RSD Step Moto bars and Nostalgia risers, finished in what RSD calls its "Black Ops" finish. The stock headlight was replaced with a Piaa projector-style headlight mounted on the left side of the engine.

This radical transformation of the Bolt's looks was accomplished with no welding or cutting. The only metal that was touched was some minor cleanup of the tank seams before painting.

Check out a couple of our previous posts featuring RSD, this one about the RSD Technics Sportster and this one about the RSD YouTube channel.

H/T to BikeEXIF, jump over and see their post about the RSD Bolt.