Deus Ex Machina "Boundless Enthusiasm Bike Build-Off"

2010 First Place Winner "Much Much Go" Honda CB250 Custom

We just learned of the Deus Ex Machina custom bike build shop's Boundless Enthusiasm Bike Build-Off. The latest was held this past October, and the team at Deus says it's now officially an annual event that they'll be hosting. The build-off was a distributed, global event held at Deus's shops in four nations: Sydney, Bali, Venice, CA and Milan, Italy. Over 200 bikes were entered.

The first and foremost guiding rule for entrants is, "Create the most with the least." The second and third rules say, respectively, that all entries must run and stop under their own power... "these are motorcycles, not art installations" as the Deus team puts it. The fourth and fifth --- final --- rules are about ingenuity, originality, and creativity in conception and execution, such as use of repurposed parts, handcrafted parts, and so on... it's not about picking items from catalogs. This is the bike build-off for the rest of us, the little guys and gals.

2013 5th Place Finisher, Backyard Customs Honda

The cool Honda CB250 that we alluded to in our previous post, the Much Much Go by Australian industrial designer Nick Eterovic, is pictured above. It took First Place in 2010's build-off. You can see the October build-off's top twenty bikes here. Our favorite is this little Honda cafe racer from Indonesia's Backyard Customs pictured to the left here.

We are very happy to hear that starting with October 2013 build-off Deus is committed to making this an annual event.

Old Empire Motorcycles Honda CB250 Brat Bike, "Vulcan"

OEM Vulcan

The design-and-build crew at Old Empire Motorcycles took a Seventies-era ugly duckling Honda CB250, transformed it into a badass brat-style mashup of bobber and cafe racer and called it "Vulcan."

If you'd asked me back in the Seventies if I ever thought a Honda CB250 could be cool, I would've wondered what planet you were from. Well, after looking at this one I can only say that attitude was just due to my own failure of imagination... this little bike is way cool. And come to think of it, a certain member of my family has a Nighthawk 250, just a later model of the old CB250..... hmmmmm, I see some possibilities...

See more pics of Vulcan at The Bike Shed and at OEM's Vulcan page.

Tip of the Hat to BIKEEXIF blog, where we found this baby.

UPDATE: Just saw this awesome CB250 custom at Silodrome.... the "Much Much Go." Wow. Will post more about it later.