Now, that’s a Sportster

There are custom Sportsters…and then there’s this. It may have started life as an ordinary 2001 XLH883, but by the time Hideki Hoshikawa of Japan’s Asterisk Custom Cycles was done, it was barely recognizable, transformed into maybe the most impressive custom of 2012. Hey, don’t just take my word for it...

Rough Crafts goes Guerilla on a Big Twin

I don’t know about you, but I always imagine the typical Harley builder commuting to his shop on a heavily modified Panhead. With perhaps a Ford F-150 in reserve for shifting bikes and reality TV crews around. Winston Yeh, founder of Rough Crafts and one of the current custom Harley designers du jour, rides a tiny PGO 125cc scooter to work. And he’s not ashamed to admit it…

Sbay’s Spanish Muscle Machine

One of the last things you’d expect in the tough economic climate afflicting the V-twin custom industry is the introduction of a new production bike. Even further down that list of expectations is that it would be from Sotogrande-Cadiz, Spain, of all places. Hey, nothing against Spain, but images of two-stroke Bultacos and OSSAs come to mind before anything like a big pushrod V-twin peppered with carbon-fiber and aluminum like this outrageous muscle bike from the Sbay Motor Company…

A first-time bike builder pays tribute to his best friend with a Jawa bobber

There’s clearly no shortage of creative moto-energy Stateside, with amazing homegrown custom motorcycles seemingly coming out in droves at each event from sea to shiny sea. Europe has also been fertile ground for outstanding bike building, but more recently a lively custom movement has been developing a bit farther to the East. Bike builder Evgeny Bakhmach is part of the movement. He hails from Kiev, Ukraine, formerly part of the USSR…

La Commando mas fina

Retirement just isn't working out for Doug McCadam. A self-described ski bum, McCadam ended up in Vail, Colorado after a long motorcycle ride in 1973. For the next 24 years he owned and operated D-J's Café, a popular local diner. His real passion was Nortons, though, and when he sold the restaurant in 1997 the goal was to build a few nice bikes in his newfound spare time. Didn't work out that way…

A new/old MV Agusta 750 F4 special

It may have been the bang on the head. Or meeting Italian racing legend Giacomo Agostini. Or the old photo of a Magni MV pinned to the wall of his shop. Or all three. Whatever spurred Canadian Jim Bush to build a replica Magni Agusta with a modern 750cc MV F4 engine doesn’t matter: the result is a spectacular blending of traditional styling and modern functionality...

How a 1980s Sportster time-warped to the 1930s to win one of 2012’s top custom-bike awards, no paint required…

Over the past nine years, the AMD World Championships of Custom Bike Building has produced a steady stream of interesting winners – not the dreaded theme-bike chopperfest many of us expected. A perfect example is the jaw-dropping 2012 Freestyle Class winner built by German Harley-Davidson dealer Thunderbike. The 1930s Bonneville racer-inspired result, dubbed “PainTTless” for its almost total lack of paint, should be called “Flawless” for its total lack of imperfections…

Surfing the globe with Bike EXIF’s best builds

Twice a year, the website Bike EXIF compiles a list of its Top Ten custom motorcycles. It's a global barometer of public taste, with bikes selected on the basis of web traffic and social media “likes.”  These are the 10 machines that wowed readers in the second half of 2012…

A new Triumph travels back to the Mojave Desert 1966

The past is a wonderful place to visit but most of us don’t want to live there. Same goes for old motorcycles. Scrumptious to look at, lovely sounds, heritage by the boatload, but living with them day-to-day can be...well, let’s face it, there’s a lot to be said for reliability, oil-tightness and a helpful little mod-con like electric starting...

AFT builds a two-up land-speeder

Who says good help is hard to find? Not Jim Giuffra of AFT Metric Customs in Jackson, California, where the shop is staffed by women – drop-dead stunners aged 18-40 – who can actually build bikes, as well as model seductively at bike shows, conventions, store openings, etc. Yup, they may be “booth candy” but the AFT Girls can out-fabricate that guy on your block who’s been restoring a ’78 Shovelhead in his garage for the last 12 years now…

You’ve got $1000 and 30 days, now go build a bike, no Harleys allowed…

You and your buddies, hanging out in your garage, have probably come up with some pretty good ideas, but have you had any that turned into a 10-year tradition, an iconic event that's imprinted on your local motorcycling scene? Poll Brown has...

Riding Steffano Motors’ re-do of a Ducati 999

Things ain’t what they used to be in the custom bike world – and the state of the economy is only partly to blame. Sure, companies like Big Dog and American Ironhorse, whose post-Discovery Channel business plan was based on selling chromed-out choppers to management types with more moolah than common sense, have indeed gone to the great corporate trashbin in the sky, but the very idea of what a custom bike should be has changed, too. That’s where guys like Robert Steffano come in...

Will Honda’s new CB1100 join the Sportster and Bonneville as a prime cafe candidate?

One of the side effects of the current second coming of the cafe-racer is that good four-cylinder Hondas from the 1970s are getting harder to find. CB400, 550 and especially 750s all are being snapped up, but the newest sohc four is now 32 years old so it was good to see Honda pull the wraps off its CB1100 retro-bike...

Ryca? We lyca...

What is hip? Hard to put into words. But for a growing number of young urban motorcyclists (YUMs?), the Ryca CS-1 Cafe Racer sums it up nicely. The Ryca’s spare lines echo the Triumphs, Nortons and BSAs of the 1960s that were stripped down for illicit racing between English coffee bars...

Implausibly, impossibly, Roland Sands is staring at the big Four-Oh. Yep, the brat bike-builder who looks like he was walking the halls in high school maybe five years ago, actually graduated in 1992 and is 38 years old. He looked even more boyish in 2004 when he burst onto the custom-bike scene...

Baby Boomers are notoriously nostalgic. And not surprisingly, Boomer motorcyclists exhibit the characteristic exceptionally well. The focus of an older motorcyclist’s mania? It’s often his or her very first motorcycle, a seminal life experience for many, an emotional collection of metal, rubber, plastic and paint that doubles as a time machine...

It's hard to be 100% ironclad about these things, but I’m pretty positive Richard Pollock of Mule Motorcycles builds the best street-trackers in the world. His aim is to make every bike he creates better than the previous one. With 120 machines built so far, that's a lot of improvements...

“Hey, Johnny,” says the dancing blonde with bells on her ears. “What are you rebelling against?”
“Whaddaya got?” replies Marlon Brando.
Brando’s cinematic rebellion in The Wild One happened from the seat of a 1950 Thunderbird 6T, early ancestor of a long string of air-cooled Triumph motorcycles that are, if you squint a little, still sold today...

It's hard to believe that the "modern" Triumph Bonneville has only been on sale since 2001. In just over a decade, the Hinckley twin has become a best-seller for the resurrected British company and one of the most popular platforms for custom bike builders worldwide...

Trends come and trends go and what’s old is oftentimes new again. The hip motorcycle fashion statement of the moment, café-racers, epitomize trendiness in what seems to me is the umpteenth revival of the original 1960s Rockers’ ride. But for some riders, café-racers have always been the bike of choice...

Color this day cool – both literally and figuratively. Literal, because it's an early January morning out in California's Mojave Desert, biting wind blowing, and the thermometer has yet to poke into the 40s.  Figurative, because we've arrived at Grange Motor Circuit for shakedown runs on one of  the horniest streetbikes in recent memory...

Let me tell you about Ed Mabry. On a trip to Texas in 2009, I visited Ed in his one-man fabrication shop on the outskirts of Fort Worth. It was a social call but almost by accident I left with a verbal agreement to buy this very special motorcycle, a one-off Triumph T150...

Shinya Kimura first pinged onto our radar screens in the early 1990s as founder of Zero Engineering, Japan, creator of some of the most wonderful, whimsical retro-styled customs and café bikes the world had ever seen, motorcycles for the pure art and soul of it...

Suppose you came across a 1972 Triumph in so-so shape. Your options are many. Run it as a daily rider, leaving an occasional oil spot when parked too long. Restore it to concours condition and never ride it, eliminating the oil spot concerns. Or you could hand it over to Kevin Dunworth at Loaded Gun Customs...

Mr. Editor Edwards parked the Harley for the next set of photos, except that Michael Bowen stepped up and began tugging urgently on the seat.

"What are you doing?" asked Terry Nails.

"Seat's about to come off," said Bowen.

"No, it's not," said Nails.

"Yes, it is," insisted Bowen, until onlookers couldn't help but be reminded of the amiable squabbles of an old married couple.

Which, of course, they are not...

We all the love the story, don't we, of the poor schmo who works overtime all week, maybe skips a few meals, just to afford new parts for the bike he's building. Weekends, holidays, late into the night, he's in an unheated garage, working by the harsh light of a bare 100-watter, busting knuckles, cursing problems, catching cat-naps next to bike, somehow gettin' it done?

This isn't that story...

At first glance, it looks like a BMW that has crashed into an oil refinery. Or what happens when you eat a lutefisk-and-lingonberry pizza, slam a few shots of akvavit, and fall into bed for a long Swedish night.

In November last year, the New York Times asked, "Is the Era of the Motorcycle Over?" It wondered if motorcycles are being replaced as "love objects" by iPhones and laptops.

The article attracted derision in the motorcycling media, but it’s not hard to see where the NYT was coming from. We know that the past three years haven’t been kind to motorcycle dealerships in the USA. And the traditional custom scene has been hit particularly hard – Big Bear Choppers is the latest of several companies to suffer a financial highside.

All you need to know about Nick Roskelley's budget-built café-racer is found hanging below the right side of the fuel tank. That's where you'll see a shiny aluminum bicycle tire pump. Like most of the components on this bike, it was not store-bought. In fact, “It was bent like a banana and thrown in a dumpster,” says the 55-year-old retired commercial diver. But the price was right so home it went to Paignton, a small seaside town on England's south coast. After numerous meetings with a rubber hammer and the polishing wheel, it now looks good as new.

Say what you will about California and – good or ill – it's undoubtedly true. But there's no denying that the Golden State, especially the sunnier portions in the south, is about as fine a place for riding motorbikes as can be found in the contiguous 48. If California had a state motorcycle, it might just be the street-tracker – two prime examples seen here, both of which reside in the same garage just a stone's throw from the Pacific Ocean near Long Beach...

Richard Pollock knows a thing or two about street-trackers. Doing business as Mule Motorcycles out of a converted two-car garage in suburban San Diego, he’s built about 100 trackers to date, and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, now that his full-time job as an aerospace fabricator has morphed into part-time consultancy, he has more time than ever to devote to two-wheelers, including doing R&D and prototyping for Streetmaster, a small Southern California speed house for new Triumph Bonnevilles.

Unless you were raised by wolves, someone has told you to Listen to your Mother! at one time or another. Not a bad piece of advice, especially for brain-addled teenagers with an unbridled passion for cars and motorcycles like brothers Justin and Jarrod Del Prado.

He was an unlikely looking pioneer, barely 5 feet tall, maybe 125 pounds all suited up, not even a teenager when he started. Yet before he turned 16, young Bobby Sirkegian would be a dominant force in the fledgling sport of motorcycle drag racing, gunning this fearsome nitromethane-burning Triumph 650 to track records from California to Kansas. He may be the best American motorcycle racer you never heard of...

Were I a mathematician, I could come up with a complex formula to calculate how much faster we used to be, maybe using weight gain and hair loss as constants, multiplied by how many years since our last race, squared by how many suit sizes our leathers have mysteriously shrunk. In my heyday, I could whip around Sears Point International Raceway at an impressive clip on my obnoxiously loud and fragile 1982 Honda Ascot roadracer. It died a noisy, messy death on the starting grid one April, but before it let out its bang-thud-CLANG! death rattle, it taught me that when it comes to 190-proof industrial fun, less mass trumps more power...at least for my needs.

There are two distinct camps when it comes to old Triumphs, purists and fanatics. Purists, no surprise, will accept nothing less than a 100-point, as-delivered-from-the-factory restoration. Anything else is unforgiveable Triumph heresy. Fanatics, on the other hand, live, breath and eat Meriden’s finest, but are a more fun-loving bunch open to interpretation – as long as it's with a pre-John Bloor Triumph. If you’re a purist type, you might as well move along to another article as this 1967 Triumph TR6 hot-rod built by TT Cycles in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, is only going to raise your blood pressure needlessly...

Almost any motorcycle looks good when photographed in a studio with cove background, soft lighting, multiple reflectors and a slavishly underpaid assistant running around attending to details. Well, here's one that looks gobsmackingly stunning while sitting in a gray concrete parking structure with rain pissing down. It's called "9½" and was built by Radical Ducati, a small shop near Madrid rapidly becoming known as one of Europe's best specials builders...

Go as you have never gone before. Thrill to the brilliant power and amazing acceleration of the Model K. A dream in motorcycle engineering finally comes true. Nimble handling ease plus Harley-Davidson reliability means a winning combination for the motorcycle sportsman. – 1952 advertisement