BIKEEXIF Custom Motorcycle Blog

If you love custom bikes of any kind --- cafe racers, bobbers, bratstyle, street trackers, choppers, classic, vintage --- or all of the above, you'll want to visit BikeEXIF.com on a regular basis. You'll find quality pictures and editorial content.

BikeEXIF is the creation of Chris Hunter of New Zealand. Chris was formerly the creative director for an advertising agency, so he knows how to design a quality website. In the video embedded below he discusses his vision for the site. Below that we have a link to his new book at Amazon, The Ride: New Custom Motorcycles and their Builders, which was published just this past week.

Seaweed & Gravel Blog and Vintage Bikes

1972 HD Sprint for Sale at Seaweed & Gravel

Seaweed & Gravel is a SoCal based company with an eclectic line of interesting products: vintage and custom bikes, vintage apparel and jewelry, surfboards, boots, bonsai trees, and other things. Check out their cool blog and current and past inventory of vintage and custom bikes.

Silodrome Gasoline Culture, a Cool Motorsports Blog

Check out Silodrome.com for all sorts of motorsports goodness.... motorcycles, cars, boats, art, clothing, films, gear... there's a special category for cafe racers, too.

The Bolt: A Sportster Killer from Yamaha?

Yamaha Star Bolt

Earlier today we did a post about the Roland Sands street tracker based on the new Yamaha Bolt. The 58ci  air-cooled V-twin is targeted right at the Harley-Davidson Sportster. So, we thought we'd followup here with a link to Cycle World magazine's Bolt vs. Sportster comparison test, which was published online just yesterday.

Back in March Cycle World published a "first look" at the Bolt and the Bolt R-Spec models here.

Roland Sands Yamaha Bolt Street Tracker

RSD Yamaha Bolt Street Tracker

The new Yamaha Bolt is a 58ci aircooled V-twin with bobber styling aimed right at the Harley-Davidson Sportster (see this recent Cycle World comparison test). As part of its rollout strategy, Yamaha shipped Bolts to a number of America's top custom bike shops to see what builders would do with it.

Among those prominent builders is pro roadracer turned custom bike designer and builder Roland Sands of Roland Sands Design (RSD) in Southern California. The street tracker you see here is his answer to Yamaha. Sands saw the Bolt as an natural conversion to the street tracker he'd been wanting to build for a while. He says that off the showroom floor the Bolt is lighter and better-handling than the Sportster.

Sands made surprisingly few changes from stock. There are the 19" Sun gold-anodized Sun wheels laced-up by Buchanan's Spoke & Rims of Azusa, CA and shod with Dunlop flattrack tires. A fiberglass seat assembly was designed and fabricated at RSD, as was a custom stainless steel exhaust system with carbon fiber tip. The stock handlebars and risers were replaced with RSD Step Moto bars and Nostalgia risers, finished in what RSD calls its "Black Ops" finish. The stock headlight was replaced with a Piaa projector-style headlight mounted on the left side of the engine.

This radical transformation of the Bolt's looks was accomplished with no welding or cutting. The only metal that was touched was some minor cleanup of the tank seams before painting.

Check out a couple of our previous posts featuring RSD, this one about the RSD Technics Sportster and this one about the RSD YouTube channel.

H/T to BikeEXIF, jump over and see their post about the RSD Bolt.

Analog Motorcycles CB550 with Sidecar, the "Family Truckster"

The "Family Truckster" is a very stylish 1978 Honda CB550 with sidecar rig from Analog Motorcycles. It belongs to Tony Prust, owner and founder of Analog. He calls it the Family Truckster because he's racked up a lot of road miles on it hauling his wife and daughter around... wife on the back, daughter in the sidecar.

Last year we featured another bike built by Prust, a well-executed 1978 Honda CB750 cafe racer called the Analog 01.

Ryca Motors Sporster Cafe Racer Kit

Ryca Motors Sportster Cafe Racer Conversion

As we noted in an earlier post today, Ryca Motors has now expanded beyond the Suzuki S40/Savage cafe racer, street tracker, and bobber conversion kits to embrace the Harley Sportster with a Sportster cafe racer conversion kit for 1991 to 2003 models. No welding is required, the conversion can be made with standard hand tools.

The base kit includes:

Fiberglass cafe racer seat
Custom Bassani exhaust
Rearsets
Burly Brand "Stilleto" shocks
Choice of clip-ons or clubman bars
Custom taillight with bracket
Choice of bikini fairing or headlight & gauges lowering kit

An upgraded version of the rearsets is also available.

This is a cool expansion of the Ryca Motors product line, and perhaps next we'll see a Sportster street tracker conversion kit from them.

Ryca Motors Suzuki S40/Savage Bobber Kit On the Market Now

Ryca Motors RR-1 Hardtail Bobber

Ryca Motors of Whittier, CA was started a few years ago by Casey Stevenson, a NASA engineer who left the agency to pursue a passion for building cafe racers based upon the Suzuki S40/Savage 650cc thumpers. We featured Ryca's low-cost cafe racer kits in a post here last year. Now we've just seen this cool hardtail bobber kit for the Suzuki, the Ryca RR-1.

Stevenson points out that the S40/Savage has been available from Suzuki for over twenty years, and there are a lot of good, clean, low-mileage S40's available in the used-bike market.

The kit is very complete, with hardtail assembly, peanut tank, a solo saddle, steel rear fender, taillight assembly, reverse cone muffler, and more. There is a raft of optional Ryca parts available, too, such as a front fender and sidemount taillight/license plate holder.

Note that the hardtail assembly bolts on to the Suzuki's frame; no welding required.

Check out the extensive customer bikes gallery at Ryca to get an idea of the cool builds riders are making with Ryca kits. Also note that Ryca has now branched out into Sportsters with a cafe racer kit for 1991 to 2003 Harley Sportsters. (That will be the subject of a later post, I think.)

Carducci Dual-Sport Sportster Conversion Kit

Carducci Dual-Sport Sportster Conversion

The Carducci Dual Sport Adventure SC3 conversion kit transforms a 1993-2003 883 or 1200 Sportster into a dual-purpose "adventure bike" with both on-road and offroad capabilities. This brings to market a Harley-Davidson based alternative to the KTM, Ducati, and Japanese dual-sport adventure bikes that have been tremendously popular in the last decade or so.

Jim Carducci and his wife are the engineering minds and company founders behind Carducci Dual Sport, LLC, which is located in Sunnyvale, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. Jim is a mechanical engineer with three decades of design experience, and his wife is an electronics engineer with years of experience in electronics control systems and software design.

Carducci Dual Sport will do complete conversion builds for customers onsite in their shop, or sell complete kits with build instructions for the do-it-yourselfer. All component parts are designed in a CAD system and tested for strength with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) modeling and simulation.

The Adventure SC3 was on display at the 4th Annual Corbin Rider Appreciation Day bike show in Hollister, CA this past July 4th weekend, where is won the IronWorks magazine "Editor's Choice Award." The bike was immediately rolled into the Corbin studio for a photoshoot for publication in an upcoming issue of IronWorks magazine.

Check out the Adventure SC3 if you are looking for a unique alternative to the mainstream adventure bikes from Ducati, Kawasaki, KTM, etc. There are plenty of good used 1993 to 2003 Sportsters on the market at anytime, it seems, and at low prices.

The Bullitt Cafe Racer Blog

Down & Out Customs Norton Manx Sportster 

Let us bring to your attention the Bullitt Cafe Racer blog. Lots of great posts with pics of cool bikes, custom bike events, supermotard and bike-build videos. Also, the owner is charting the progress of three cafe racer builds he is doing: a contemporary Triumph, a vintage Honda CB, and a classic Yamaha XS.

The Sportster-engined cafe racer pictured here is a recent feature from the Bullitt Blog. Check it out.

Classified Moto CB400

Here again you see a plain-jane bike, a 1980 Honda CB400 Hawk, transformed into a ballsy custom by John Ryland of Classified Moto. This is one of a pair of 1980 Hawks made for one of Ryland's clients.

See more pics and details at the BikeEXIF blog.