The Best Custom Motorcycles In The World, July 3rd 2014
Welcome to The Week In Bikes, your weekly CliffsNotes version of the best new custom bikes in the world.
Greg Hageman’s 1995 Yamaha XV750
We’ve featured a couple of Greg’s bikes on here before and with good reason. He’s got a knack for taking otherwise vanilla Yamaha cruisers and turning them into objets d’art, and this bike is no different as a clean, all-Yamaha affair. He took the front off of an R1 sportbike—wheel and all—and then used the tank from a ‘73 Yamaha to tie everything together.
Renard’s K75 Beemer
Renard Speed Shop is that group of Estonians who dropped the $100,000 all-carbon fiber bike on the world a few years back, and they’ve just worked their magic on BMW’s coked-up ‘80s street fighter. After rescuing the bike from a decade of storage, they decided to work with it because its low center of gravity meant it had potential for performance.
Atom Bomb’s Ducati 900SS
Virginia staple Atom Bomb goes a step beyond most custom bikes. Rather than swap in a bigger, better Ducati frame, a brand-new frame was built from scratch using Ducati’s original blueprints. The body is purely hand-formed aluminum and the engine has more go-fast bits than most people could handle.
Dust Motorcycles’ Dales Tracker
The guys at Dust believe in making “usable modern classics,” and that’s exactly what you see here. This bike started out life as a BMW R100T, and they decided to put it on a diet. So on went a narrow fuel tank from a Yamaha for a slimming effect, and all of the mechanical bits were reworked to be as reliable as possible.
The Gas Department’s “Summer Night” Bultaco Cafe Racer
The Gas Department is a small shop in Barcelona, and while the guys wanted to build an old cafe racer, they also wanted to build a bike that meant something personally and reflected their Spanish heritage. Enter this 1964 Bultaco. The Spanish manufacturer focused mostly on dirt bikes, but this sport bike received a full refresh, augmented by a fair amount of Yamaha high-performance goodies. Essentially, it’s the cafe racer Steve McQueen would have ridden if he were Spanish. H/T: Pipeburn.
The Triumph Scraton
This might be the first time in history that anyone was able to say that a Frenchman went to Spain and built an English bike. First things first, the name: the guy, Toni, built a Scrambler—Scra-Ton. It’s like Scranton but without the terribleness. Whereas most builders take an old bike and add modern components, Toni started off with a 2013 Triumph Scrambler, hid the electrics, and threw on some proper motocross handlebars. Not bad for a Franco-Spanish-Brit, eh? H/T: The Bike Shed.
JMR Customs’ Honda CX 500
While this is a bike with many styling touches, the key to everything is the exhaust. Take a very close look and you’ll see that the exhaust from each side wraps inward and joins into a single tailpipe behind the seat. Aside from being cool and unique, that meant basically the entire electronics system had to be relocated to the bottom of the bike, since you don’t want an acid-filled battery sitting right next to searing hot metal. H/T: Pipeburn.
Aaron Miller is the Rides editor for Supercompressor. He likes all these bikes, but if he had to pick, the Renard guys won him over when they said their bike sounds like an E30.