When you think of custom Harley-Davidsons, you likely tend to think of the Sturgis, Sons of Anarchy, Daytona Beach, and Southern California ape-hanger crowds. It's a certain aesthetic that denotes you're a part of the Harley Motor Co. crowd, and oversized silver skull rings and leather cuts abound.
There's also a sizable branch of hot-rodders and custom motorcycle builders that can turn any Harley engine into something that's positively a work of art. What you likely don't think of are diesel engine swaps. But maybe you should be, as the following custom Harley-Davidson not only looks the part, but it was made to solve some incredible problems.
See, this tractor engine-swapped Harley Softtail was built by an engineering student, and his cohorts, in British Columbia, Canada, and was thought up to both used biodiesel and/or old cooking oil, while reducing CO2 emissions of the university's heavy machinery, i.e. its gardening, trucks, and other vehicles. But to put theory into reality, they chose to showcase their ideas through the lens of a motorcycle with a Kubota diesel engine.
That's some clever students.
According to the engineering student's, Alex Jennison, LinkedIn, "After 12 months of scrambling at how to put a diesel tractor engine in a motorcycle (late nights, machining, welding, and begging for technical advice)—I’ve built a biodiesel-powered Harley Davidson from scratch. Not for profit. Not for show. But to prove a point: Clean fuels are viable today."
Jennison's reasoning behind the swap is sound, too, as while many point to electric powertrains as being the answer to the world's warming, there are still massive problems with these technologies, including being finite resources themselves, how they're mined, import and export, and conflicts around the world. Jennison also points to the vast majority of mechanics already being skilled laborers with petroleum-powered engines.
"Most university and municipal fleets still run on diesel," states the engineering student, adding, "And heavy-duty electric vehicles still rely on materials like:Cobalt — mined by children, women and men in the DRC, 7 of whom die a week in collapsed mines. Copper — extracted by burning Amazon basin ecosystems to the ground. What if universities powered their fleets using treated waste oil from their own cafeterias?"
He goes on to say, "That’s what my team and I worked on at UBC for 15 months. We developed cold-climate-compatible biodiesel tech with our university’s 400-vehicle fleet operator— reducing CO2 by 74% — and I installed it into a custom diesel motorcycle as a rolling proof of concept."
The engine is out of a Kubota tractor that Jennison and his team have modified for their proof of concept. And their goal is to now raise enough money through GoFundMe to allow Jennison to complete a 1,200-mile road trip to show the world their theory is sound. "This project started as a student research initiative at UBC. Now, it’s become something much bigger—a campaign to change how we think about sustainable transportation," the student says on the funding page.
Right now, support pledges are sitting at around $5,000 of a $15,000 goal and, hopefully, they can pull it off, as I, too, think that battery electric vehicles may not be the only answer.
