Gregor Halenda

“When I started riding big adventure bikes I did a lot of training. I’d train with Jimmy Lewis and Scott Harden, both Dakar veterans, and I’d be amazed at how capable these big bikes could be. I did many solo adventures and once found myself on a rugged single track trail in Wisconsin on my KTM 950 Adventure. I attempted a big rocky hill climb and ended up falling downhill. The bike pinned me and gas was pouring out of the tanks all over my gear. I couldn’t get the bike off me as I was on the downhill side and I imagined being immolated in the forest all alone. Eventually, I got out, got the bike up and vowed never do dumb things while riding solo again!” – Gregor Halenda

Gregor is a professional photographer and motorcycle builder based in Portland, Oregon in the United States of America. “My first motorcycle was a 1974 Honda Elsinore 125. My parents had a deal with me that if I could save up half the money for anything, they’d pay the other half. As it turns out the only thing that deal didn’t include was motorcycles. So it took longer and meant more when I did finally save up the money for that dirt bike.” It was this bike that Gregor rode exclusively till he turned sixteen. “I quit riding the dirt bike when I got my car license and didn’t get on a bike again until I was twenty-five. I’d found an abandoned BMW R90S outside a garage in Colorado. It took a few months to save up the $950 for that bike. I rebuilt it, and my father and I took our first epic motorcycle trip a few months later traveling 4000 mi / 6440 km in two weeks through the desert in the southwest. That bike lit the fire that still burns with me today.”

Little did Gregor know that this first trip with his Father would be a rather auspicious start to his moto traveling career. “We were on our R90S’ just outside of Tuscon in Arizona with plans to get to a small town north. As we got underway a massive thunderhead of clouds blackened out the sky and lightning started crashing down all over. We didn’t mind the rain that came with it, but lightning was too much. So we sheltered at a service station expecting it to blow over, but after several hours it just got worse. We didn’t want to turn around, we never turn around, and so we decided to gamble and ride into the storm hoping to make the next town before the motels closed. For several hours the rain-soaked through our leathers and lightning would strike the mountain tops.”

“We kept trying to find a shelter of any kind, but it was just an endless forest. Finally, we saw a red neon glow up the road that we knew would be some kind of business where we’d get out of the rain. We picked up the pace excitedly waving to each other at our good luck. However, when we rounded the corner, there was a massive 130 ft / 40 m high pine tree fully engulfed in flames! Split down the center from lightning. We stopped to watch, mesmerized, and when my father motioned to get moving I said, ‘But lightning never strikes the same place twice! Besides, it’s warm.’ My father yelled back, ‘That’s a myth!’ Shut his visor and took off down the road. Another hour later we finally came to a town where we got the last room in the only hotel. We were drenched to the bone and shivering.”

Along with his love for motorcycles, photography has also been a constant for Gregor. “I started as a photojournalist in high school, then college and then worked for newspapers in Colorado. I didn’t see a financial future in it and decided to try my hand in New York City. I assisted a famous portrait photographer, got some lucky breaks, and my career took off doing high end still life. That afforded me the opportunity to road race motorcycles which in turn led me to a brief few years of being a professional stunt rider for BMW’s motorcycle ads. Which in turn led to me to decide that I should shoot those ads instead of ride in them.” Gregor has shot campaigns for BMW, Ducati, Rev’It! Scorpion, KTM and many others to date.

He also got involved in the building side of motorcycling before it was all the rage. “I would ride my BMW R90S all over the country and from Colorado to New York. Then In 1998 I crashed it pretty badly and wasn’t sure if it was worth fixing, so it sat in storage for a while. That was until an aluminum cafe racer tank showed up from The Tank Shop in Scotland. I’d ordered it a year before, and it arrived just weeks after I’d crashed the bike. So I decided I’d build a bike around the tank.” At the time Gregor’s idea on how to build a bike centered around buying parts from catalogs. Luckily he found himself in a group of friends who were master fabricators, engineers, and machinists. “They offered to help me turn my vision of a BMW cafe racer into a reality. Scott Kolb was the main builder and an absolute genius with any material. He has since turned his talents to land speed racing and currently holds the 125cc record.”

“At the time, almost 20 years ago, BMW cafe racers were not popular in the USA, so my idea was pretty unorthodox. A cafe racer was either a Triumph or a Norton, but I thought a BMW could be as beautiful and more reliable. But it needed to be well done and fundamentally changed. So we made a new frame and suspended the engine in a trellis, I designed the exhaust and sourced the bodywork from different bikes, and we finished the bike the night before the 1999 BMW MOA rally. The bike made a huge impression as probably the most aggressive and inventive BMW build at the time. We won several awards including best cafe racer and best of show.”

It was this successful start in building custom motorcycles and the talents of his friends who helped create a desire for more in Gregor. “I wanted to build bikes and have those fabrication skills. So for the last two decades, I’ve been learning to machine, weld, fabricate and form metal. I have a full machine shop in my garage, and I’ve been collecting the tools and skills to make my bikes. My history as a road, rally and flat track racer all influence my builds. I want my bikes to be beautiful, but above all I want them to work better than anything else out there. Function is paramount, and I test constantly.”

With this pursuit of perfection, it’s no surprise that Gregors specifically prefers refining the Airhead offering from BMW. “It’s imperative for me to ride the older motorcycles, partly because my first serious bike was an older BMW. I have a strong connection to them, but more importantly, I feel that there’s a more direct connection to the mechanical soul of the motorcycle. Modern bikes do everything well, to the point that you’re separated from the mechanical experience of what you’re doing which is riding a motor suspended between two wheels. A motorcycle is the purest possible way to experience a human to mechanical connection. To me, the era before electronic controls is the most elemental. The beauty of the airhead is it’s a perfectly functional design. You can see the cylinders sitting in the wind just in front of your knees. That engine is so overbuilt, so perfectly machined and so unique that I fell in love with it. It’s partly why I wanted to build my cafe racer; too perfect a motorcycle worthy of that iconic engine. My goal now is to do the same with an adventure bike. To keep stripping it back and making it lighter and better until it’s as perfect as it can be.”

Gregor’s current bike showed up one day on bike-urious.com. “A site I love to follow. I’d not seen the build thread for the bike, but I’d been collecting parts to build a new bike, an airhead GS after my father passed away. I wanted to make a bike in his memory. A GS that he’d have wanted when he was younger.” Originally the bike had been built in Canada using a lot of the traditional mods that HPN and the GS community as a whole have used before; Yamaha WR forks, an R1100GS swing-arm and bracing to the frame. “The tanks are what caught my attention though, namely the monocoque subframe fuel tank.” However, Gregor didn’t initially intend to purchase the bike. “I researched it and then eventually got in touch with the person who’d bought it to ask some questions. He’d had issues with it burning oil and couldn’t title it, so he offered it to me. I didn’t want another person’s project, but then I thought it might be a good opportunity to ride a GS with many of the mods I wanted to include and see what changes I’d want to make on my bike.” So the pony was added to the stable.

“In the year I’ve owned the bike I’ve replaced everything on it but the tanks and the frame, and even those I’ve modified. My main goal has been to refine not just this bike but the whole idea of a BMW GS. I’ve replaced the engine with one from a mid 80’s R100RS as they use the largest valves and biggest carbs. I have replaced the old forks with brand new ones from a KTM 690R but with triple clamps from a 450SX to reduce the offset further. I machined a custom stem to adapt the setup. One thing that people notice but maybe aren’t aware of is the hand-guards. They are from Highway Dirt Bikes and are simply the best hand-guards on the market bar none. You could easily hold the weight of the entire bike off these. By bolting them to the triple clamp, the guards can’t rotate which is even more important on a large adventure bike. The tucked in mirrors are fantastic and stay out of the way on the trails but are clear when used in traffic.”

“Perhaps the most significant change was to have Woody of Woody’s Wheel Works work with me to design a particular wheelset for the bike. We created true dirt set in his SuperLight / SuperLaced style using a 1.6×21 front wheel and a 2.15×18 rear with Excel A60 rims. The custom billet hubs separate the brake carrier from the wheel hub. The new rim design, being narrower, squeezes the tire together to make a very round profile. This increases its turn in speed and gives better compliance. Those rims allowed me to use the most aggressive tires I could find; Goldentyre’s GT723, their rally raid tire. I’m using the fatty front version in 90/100 and a rear of 140 width. To get such a massive tire to fit on the BMW the R1100GS swing-arm had to be completely cut apart, and I machined a new billet shock mount moving the mounting position in 1.5” / 3.8 cm to gain clearance. It took weeks, but we lost over 20 lbs / 9 kgs of unsprung rotating weight, and the bike feels like it lost 100 lbs / 45 kg when you ride it. The transformation was truly incredible.”

“The previous owner had fabricated the tanks and modified the frame to raise the engine. I love the look of the bike but working on it is difficult, so that’s an area I’m hoping to improve. I’ve made changes to the frame, but most of my changes now are focused on the bike slash rider interface. Different pegs, bars, top clamp, controls, and brakes. All of these things were chosen to create a better interface. My racing career taught me the importance of having an intuitive cockpit. The brake and shift levers are fabricated from stainless tubing and use precision needle bearings so that they are smooth and tight. It’s a work in progress, but this bike is truly a test mule for the next bike I’m designing. A complete reimagining of the GS Airhead idea where I will make a frame that picks up from where my cafe racer had left off. My goal is to build the ultimate GS motorcycle. A bike with no compromises!”

This past weekend saw Gregor’s Airhead GS exhibited at the 10th Anniversary of The One Motorcycle Show in Portland.

For more on Gregor’s exploits follow him on Instagram or check out his portfolio.