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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