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A longtime client and good friend of the shop had had a small mishap on his Hellcat (from Confederate Motorcycles) due to an unfortunate brake failure. He could have just asked someone to do a simple repair on the dented tank and scratched engine. Instead, he turned to his friends at Revival (that’s us!) and asked if we were interested in a complete transformation of the bike’s factory look. Obviously, the answer was yes!
This was by far the most challenging design we’d ever undertaken at that point. Not really from a technical place — the original chassis and most of the electrics remained in place — but from a purely aesthetic point of view. The Hellcat has a very distinct visual design; it's not exactly an empty canvas upon which to just throw paint haphazardly.
Alan naturally obsessed over the design, sketching out simple drawings, images, shapes, cardboard bucks, and taped line drawings. Eventually, he reached out to the team for their input, which is always spot on. Baked into Revival’s DNA is the belief that a whole team’s vision and execution are better than that of any single person, and there’s no better example of that than the Hellcat project.
The major concern was keeping the frame/engine/suspension as untouched as possible while transforming the motorcycle into something that paid true homage to the original.
A hand-formed alloy fuel tank was sculpted to fit the Hellcat’s backbone, as well as the new, more upright seating position. A CNC-machined subframe was fabricated similarly to the original, but in this case, it ended up being far more organically shaped. In order to raise the seat height and hide the ECU, new shapes were required for the cockpit.
Inspired by the bike’s stock seat, Revival created a bespoke leather saddle. A hand-formed alloy tail section was fabricated, along with a unique fuel tank. Once these were in place, custom asymmetric panels covered the oil cooler on the left-hand side and the air intake on the right-hand side. The complementary mesh screen was laser-cut to match the primary cover screens.
From there, Revival used a xenon projector headlight and handbuilt an alloy surround to give the nose more visual interest. The original exhaust was deemed unsightly, as it was covering too much of the beautiful engine, so a new stainless steel exhaust was built, complete with a hand-formed 2-into-1 silencer that hangs down and exits toward the ground beneath the engine. The resulting rumble is utterly intoxicating.
One of the finer touches of the earlier Hellcats, removed on later models due to fabrication issues, was the belly pan/muffler. As an homage, a new hand-shaped alloy belly pan was fabricated to conceal the exhaust and engine underside, with hidden cutouts and a mesh air scoop insert that allows for more airflow and a smooth, clean appearance.
To make the motorcycle more comfortable and controllable, a bespoke handlebar clamp was machined to remove the factory clip-on bars and more carefully blend with the Confederate triple clamps. This greatly improves the ergonomics of the machine, so a day-long ride won’t just utterly destroy a rider. Revival Cycles’ own push-button alloy housings were fitted to the handlebars, along with alloy push buttons, for a simple cockpit that feels great and functions just as well. Beringer brake and clutch controls complement the set-up for incredible braking power.
We consider this to be among our most interesting design challenges yet, and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. We decided to call it “The Revival 140,” because we think any motorcycle that weighs less than 500lbs and has 140-foot pounds of torque DESERVES to be known by that name.
