Author: James Joseph

If you want to start metal shaping, don’t do what Kasper Branski did and take on a Masterati 300S roadster as your freshman project, because no one who is new to an English wheel should be able to create an ultra-rare, bare-metal race replica. But Branski did, and he says, “It was quite a big project, a pretty steep undertaking, especially when I didn’t have a lot of experience with metal shaping.” Now he is working on a Harley-Davidson Evo chopper, with most of the parts on the bike being handmade. Branski says, “Being the one who built the machine yourself, you know all the flaws. It’s really difficult to stand back, look at the creation, and really appreciate it without picking out the flaws.”

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Built in only 20 weeks by 27-year-old Dutch designer Luuc Muis, this 2019 Indian Scout Bobber is inspired by 1910 boardtracker designs and the hypothetical question, “What if the visual design of motorcycles never developed in a hundred years, but technique did?” The result is the “Hasty Flaming Buffalo,” a project bike “that got a little bit out of hand.” Luuc started the build by doing a 3-D scan of the Scout’s V-twin and creating digital models of main frame components, which were then CNC milled into existence. From there the Hasty Flaming Buffalo’s story gets even stranger, and it’s a story best told by its bushy-bearded builder.
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Daniel Clarke was riding his Ironhead when he was hit by a car. He nearly lost his left leg and spent two weeks in the hospital before returning home to recover, and he kept himself busy by imagining how he would rebuild his wrecked Sportster. He thumbed through old chopper magazines, pulling pages for inspiration, and with the help of a few friends he brought to life the hardtail chopper he always wanted, “The Death Trap.”

Clarke currently serves in the Royal Navy and says, “I have been lucky enough to have a huge team of physios and divisional support from the Naval Service Recover Centre Hasler, which has helped me be able to get my body and my project to this stage. Thank you for the opportunity to showcase my bike … it’s a great morale boost.”

Euan Ryan of Shoogly Shed Motors says, “If you’re trying to give a bike that ‘show finish,’ then everything has to be perfect, as if it were a production model, and as perfect as I’d like this build to be it was never going to be, so I embraced that and I tried to make it feel like a bike that you would have to knock up in some kind of post-apocalyptic world.” A Valentine’s Day gift from his wife, this 1980 Yamaha XS250 came to Ryan in bad health, because its previous owner had left it outside for six years. It was too rotted for a restoration, but Ryan figured he could salvage the bike as a full custom. “Built entirely during the COVID-19 Lockdown in the U.K., this Street Scrambler was a challenge like none I’d taken up before,” Ryan says.

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Rick Hannah of Dirty Dick’s Motos has always had a curious attraction toward the Kawasaki W650. He wondered, “Why would anyone build such an old-looking bike with a bevel engine?” so in 2016 he bought his first Kawasaki W650 off of Ebay, and not long after he bought two more well-worn W650s, which he rebuilt and named “Crusty” and “Minty”. This is “Minty,” a form-and-function desert sled, “done to exacting standards, ” with a 60’s look and modern performance. Hannah says, “There isn’t a huge aftermarket for the W650—nowhere near Bonneville levels—so most of this build was custom and a labour of love.”

This 1975 Ducati Scrambler 350 is built by November Customs, which is backyard shop run by the talented husband-and-wife team of Paul and Linda. Paul says, “This bike was built for a client after he got in touch asking about the Ducati Scrambler 350 we built last year, saying how much he’d like one exactly the same, so we jumped at the chance to build another one along the same lines but with certain differences.”

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When John Garrett bought this 1994 Ducati monster 600 as a project bike, it was almost stock—apart from a twin-disc front brake conversion —and over the last few years he transformed it into “Cafeteria.” The previous owner had removed the airbox, so the Monster ran poorly, but it was nothing that new jets and tune couldn’t fix. Garrett bought a café-style fuel tank from Red Max Speed Shop and a smaller, simpler fiberglass tail section, and then he sourced wheels from a Monster 620 so he could run a wider rear tire. He bought a slip-on exhaust from America, ordered a new speedometer from Amazon, and installed a leather saddlebag from India. Garrett says, “I made the leather tank strap out of the shoulder bag that actually came with the saddle bag.”

When Alex Fabian turned 30 years old, he had a mild existential crisis and bought this 2017 Harley-Davidson Forty-Eight with intentions of building a head-turning bobber. He says, “I’ve never been a Harley guy, and I’ve always owned sports bikes, but I wanted a change. I wanted something that looked cool, and I didn’t care about comfort.” His build is absolutely outrageous, with offset twin LED headlights, a sprung solo seat, swept-back drag bars, a mini air filter, barley-there exhaust pipes, and a big, Friscoe-style fuel tank that isn’t lacquered, which means it will rust if exposed to water. With any luck this dramatically styled Sportster will keep Fabian feeling young and spry for years to come.

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When Chris Dodd walked into the Triumph dealership and saw this 2018 Triumph Street Scrambler, which was modified by the service department with a faux patina fuel tank, he fell in love with the bike and bought it. Dodd says, “When I got it home the first thing I did was start taking ‘the modern’ off to make the bike a bit more retro and a bit more classic.” He ordered “a myriad of Triumph catalog parts,” tinted the headlight in amber, installed a set of knobby tires and a Vance & Hines high pipe, and kept modifying until he had created the bike you see here, “Rusty.”

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“I have been a motorcycle mechanic for over 20 years but never done a custom build until now,” says Oliver Lewin, the owner and builder of this 1977 Suzuki GS750. Lewin bought the GS750 disassembled—its many pieces shoved into brown boxes—and he started sourcing parts from other motorcycles, like rear wheel from a Suzuki SV650 and the front end from a Suzuki GXS-R750. Lewin’s favorite parts of the GS750 are “the little touches,” like the brake cylinder bracket made from coat hangers, and he says, “I was lucky enough to have it exhibited at the bike shed London Show in 2019, and now I’m building a custom two-stroke Suzuki GT5550,” which he plans to enter into next The Bike Shed London Show.

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25-year-old Alex LAST NAME is a Londoner living in Amsterdam, and during quarantine he turned his apartment’s living room into a makeshift workshop to start on his first-ever custom motorcycle build. Alex says, “I had zero tools and pretty much zero knowledge of how to get the bike where I wanted it,” but last August he bought a 1989 BMWK100 LT, stripped it bare, and found “layers and layers of dirt caked on every surface.”

After days spent cleaning his flat morphed into a paint studio, and inside of his home Alex spray-painted the engine block and covers. He rebuilt the brakes and the throttle bodies, too, and he swapped on a front end from a Suzuki GSXR-750 using Cognito Moto’s conversion kit. Alex says, “The new front end gives the bike a much more aggressive stance and allowed me to have some fun with the wheels,” which came from Haan Wheels in the Netherlands.

Alex moved Bertha outside when he started wiring, and he nixed the stock tachometer in favor of a digital gauge from Motogadget, which communicates with the keyless-ignition that is being built into the seat. Alex is now in the final stages of the build, with only the subframe, seat, exhaust, and a few odds and ends to finish, and he says, “There are certainly many things I will do differently for my next project, but I’ve managed to do way more than I ever thought I could, and I learned a massive amount along the way, and I cannot wait to get her on the open road, and hopefully to the Bike Shed London Show in 2021!”

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“It’s ten years in the making,” says Mark O’Kelly of his 1978 Laverda Mirage Special. O’Kelly has loved Laverdas since he was a teenager, and after graduating college he  got a bank loan and bought his first Laverda Jota. As badly as he wanted to modify that bike, he couldn’t afford to, so the Mirage 1200 you see here is the dream Jota that O’Kelly never had a chance to build. “The tank on the Jota I bought was almost identical to the tank on this bike,” O’Kelly says, explaining how he used old photos to have a one-off tank and matching seat cowl made for this beautiful passion project.

Over two months 20-year-old Emily Liddell built this Kawasaki ER5 custom with the help of her grandfather, Rob, who is an O.G. café racer . Emily says, “This bike was my first ever build after years of wanting to make my own custom, and after getting my A2 licence I bought the ER5 as a project to build and learn on … I wanted it to be the best-looking ER5 anyone had every seen.” The previous owner had cut the naked bike’s subframe too short for Emily’s liking, so she and her grandad added some length to it, and then they handmade some aluminum insets for the fuel tank. Emily says, “In my opinion, the bike looks insane now that it’s finished.”

Giacomo Galbiati of GDesign Custom Motorcycles is not an engineer but an artist, and he says, “My creations want art more than performance, and those who look at my bikes must look at a painting in the same way, hoping to have the same emotions.” Galbiati built this mid-control 1999 Kawasaki W650 with a chopper-style peanut tank and the cowl and tail from a café racer, and he etched all of the W650’s engine cases with checkered flags and racing paraphernalia.

In a November 2018 interview, Aston Neale Motorcycles described themselves as “two mates that build custom bikes in our garage at the bottom of the garden at the weekend.” Hadley Aston Lloyd didn’t have his motorcycle license when he started working on with Jeff Neale on this 1974 Honda CB360, a barn find that had only 12,000 miles on the odometer before Lloyd took an angle grinder to its back half. While there are dozens of exquisite details on this build, far and away the most creative detail is the starter button, which has been sunk into a nut on the top yoke.

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Steve Dawkins spent five years building the 1976 Honda “Hondawkins” CB550, and he did everything himself, apart from the engine work; when your good friend is a professional engine builder, you call him for help. Dawkins struggled most with the dual-disc conversion for the front brakes, though in the end he managed to pull it off, and you can clearly see the years of work Dawkins put into his café racer by examining its many meticulously finished details, from the sculpted knee dents in the fuel tank to the high-spec paintwork that makes the CB glow under sunlight.

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Joris Verstrepen says his Triumph Speed Twin 5T is built to race. He started with a ’53 model that had been stored for 40 years, and he took inspiration for his build from old Triumph pictures and the famous Triumph customizer and racer Bryan Thompson. Verstrepen dismantled his bike, stored its original parts, and began sourcing replacement parts for “The Shark,” including Matchless mudguards, a T100 front brake, and a teardrop fuel tank from ‘68 Bonneville. Even though “The Shark” has a modified 750cc 6T engine, Verstrepen would prefer an engine with more power, but for now he is focused on another motorcycle build, the unfinished “Shark 2.”

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This is Ben Miller’s first-ever shed build, a 1985 Honda CG125 he customized alongside his father and his brother. They started with a stock donor bike and stripped it of its plastics, welded on a hooped subframe, and powder-coated the frame. They shortened and wrapped the exhaust, had the fuel tank sprayed in emerald green, and finished the little scrambler with a quilted seat. “We wanted to start on something small, hence the 125 cc, but we plan on doing lots more bikes in the future,” Miller says; they are now building a bobber out of a Yamaha XVS125.

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Tucked away in the medieval English town of Stratford-upon-Avon is BGM Café Racers, which built this 1992 Honda CB750 for a client who wanted a classic, cost-effective café racer. The client insisted that the “RC42” have velocity stacks hung from its four carburetors and a one-off monocoque body that made use of the original fuel tank, but otherwise he left it up to BGM. The “RC42” has too many wonderful touches, from the hydraulic clutch conversion to the one-off top yoke with integrated Motogadget digital gauge, but the best part of the bike has to be the sci-fi DIY taillight. “The plan was to use off-the-shelf taillights, but we couldn’t find anything that suited the bike, so we made one from scratch … it was all handmade in the shop, edge lit, with LED lights, crafted by BGM.”

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In 2017 Duncan Taylor started building this barn-find, 1978 Suzuki GS750 in his living room, but after he started renovating his house he had to move the bike outside and build himself a small outdoor shed so he properly finish off his “pride and joy.” Taylor modified an eBay-bought seat pan and took it to a local furniture shop, which wrapped the seat in black vinyl and finished it in pale green stitching that matches the fuel tank and the headlight bucket. When he goes to turn the key on his Suzuki, Taylor says, “It’s probably going to sound like a bag of nails cos it needs a bit of tuning, but hopefully it’ll start.”

 

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This Moto Guzzi Nevada 750 didn’t look nearly as good as it does now when Ian Birch first found it. Its former owner had left it uncovered and unloved for several years, and the bike was covered in rust and running on one cylinder, but the Guzzi ran fine after Ian swapped out a faulty coil. Birch started first custom motorcycle build by stripping bare the frame, repositioning the upper shock mounts, and dropping the forks through the yokes by 25mm. He chopped and looped the rear seat and mounted a set of 18-inch wheels to give the Nevada a flatter stance. He had the frame powder-coated and the engine rebuilt and painted; plucked a fuel tank from a Guzzi V50 Imola; wired the bike to Motogadget mo-unit Blue; and had the seat and grips trimmed in antique leather. Birch says, “The bike sounds awesome and has an aggressive stance, and I just need the lockdown to end so I can get out on it!”

An Austrian-Indian mash-up by shed builder Gareth Ross, this brand-new, 2019 Royal Enfield Interceptor 650 is fitted with the front end and rear wheel from a KTM Duke 390. Ross shortened the exhaust and made a pair of removable baffles—without them the bike was too loud to ride at Lydden Hill—and the exhaust hangers have been removed to clean up the back end. Ross modified the mudguard, replaced the tail lights, and relocated the ignition switch to sit under the tank. Holy Goat Customs shortened the seat and wrapped it in quilted leather, and they also made a bespoke set of Union Jack tank pads to match.

It has been a decade since Giacomo Galbiati customized his first bike. He started by modifying a moped, and after a few years of nurturing his passion, he dedicated himself to building motorcycles and started GDesign Custom Motorcycles. Galbiati says, “The Royal Enfield ‘Born to Fly’ was born after six months of intense work. My creations want art more than performance, and those who look at my bikes must look at a painting in the same way, hoping to have the same emotions … unique things.”