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.

Bratstyle Bikes

Bratstyle Yamaha SR400 Streettracker

I've been looking at "bratstyle" bikes from Japan this week. Seems to be a very popular concept in Nippon, and is catching on in some quarters here in the US. I can't really define the style, except to say that it seems to be a kind of mashup of bobber, cafe racer, and streetracker based on low-cost bikes, for example, the Yamaha SR400 and the Honda CB350.

Google around for bratstyle and you'll find a lot of cool bikes that are low-cost, everyday riders... Bratstyle.com is a good place to start, and check out  this post at the Bikers Cafe Blog.

Deus Ex Machina Customs Cafe Racers, Streettrackers & Bobbers

Deus Kawi WS650 Streettracker

In a mere six years, Deus Customs has grown by leaps and bounds, expanding from their first shop in Sydney, Australia to new venues in Bali and Venice, California. Owner Mikey McDonald attributes Deus's quick, outstanding success to the desire of a growing number of riders for simple lightweight and middleweight bikes that are economical daily riders. McDonald and his crew's great sense of style is a huge factor in their success, too.

McDonald is no brand bigot, either... They've built customs with vintage and modern Triumphs, BMWs, vintage and modern Kawasakis, Sportsters, Yamaha SR400 and SR500 thumpers, and more. The Kawasaki WS650 and WS800 does seem to be a particular favorite, however, such as the two examples you see here, a streettracker and a bobber. Well, just follow this link to their gallery of beautiful and stylish bikes to see for yourself.

Deus Moulin Rouge Bobber

An added bonus: The Deus website is very well-designed, just beautifully done, a pleasure to read and look at.

For those of you who prefer your bikes with peddles, check out the stylish Deus bicycles.

LSL Clubman Kawasaki W800 Customs

Clubman LindyBob Kawasaki W800

I've been looking around the Web lately to see who's out there building cool customs based on the Kawasaki W650 and W800 models and am finding a surprising number of really great machines. A couple of prime examples are these two from Clubman by LSL, a custom shop in Germany. 

The W650 and its successor, the W800, are retro standards inspired by the Triumph and BSA parallel twins of the Sixties... Nostalgia delivered at low-cost and with high reliability and Japanese quality. Turns out they're a great platform for custom builders.

Clubman W800 Streettracker

The Clubman LSL website is in German... I can't see that they have a button to flip it to English. Can't speak or read the language, so I am at a handicap as far as the shop's details are concerned. However, I did find this new post at BikeEXIF about the LindyBob. That post included a link to an earlier BikeEXIF post about LSL's Triumph Scrambler custom. Check 'em out, LSL does beautiful work.

Hammarhead Industries, Minimalist Bikes Brought to You by a Neuropsychologist

Hammarhead Jake Pine Triumph Scrambler

So, you think you've made a big change in career direction somewhere along the way?  Well, it's safe to bet that James Loughead's got you beat when it comes to doing a career 180... He's absolutely gotta be the only guy on the planet with a PhD in neuropsychology who builds custom bikes for a living. And excels at it, to boot.

James takes a minimalist approach, building stripped-down customs, often in a matte-black finish, at his Hammarhead Industries shop in Philadelphia. His Jack Pine scrambler, a modified Triumph TT100, that you see here got a lot of great press and rave reviews when it debuted recently. It's available for $16,500 a copy.

James also rebuilt a Royal Enfield Bullet as an EnerTrac powered electric cafe racer, and dubbed it the Volta 102. It looks like a classic GP racer of the Sixties, high-tech and retro at the same time. You can have one for $18,500.

You can see some bike builds at the Hammarhead video channel that James maintains.
You can read more about the Jack Pine special in a recent piece by the crew at BikeEXIF. Several good, high-res pics there with lots details concerning its construction. Also check out this Hold Fast interview with James we've embedded here.

Analog Motorcycles Honda Cafe Racer

Analog Motorcycles "Analog 01" Honda Cafe Racer

Awhile back we stumbled across a very elegant and classic Yamaha RD350 cafe racer from Analog Motorcycles that was featured at BIKEEXIF. We were so impressed with its clean good looks and stylish logo that we jumped to Analog's site to have a look around and liked what we saw there. So, we featured one of Analog owner Tony Prust's customer builds, a clean and muscular Kawasaki K750 streettracker here.

We went back the other day to take a look at what might be new or what we might have missed the first time through and found this Honda cafe racer, the Analog 01. Follow the link and you'll see a gallery of very good photos of the bike from all angles.

       

Shaw Speed & Custom's Sportsters

Shaw Sportster XLST3 Scrambler

Shaw Speed & Custom in the UK built this awesome Sportster scrambler. For you Sportster fans, they've got quite a line-up of Sporty-based customs.

Check out their Big Twin customs, too.

Tip of the hat to the folks at BIKEEXIF.






         

Sportster Street Tracker Conversion Kit from Phil Little

Phil Little Racing's Sportster Street Tracker

A lot of people have been in here to see our recent post about the Steve Storz Sportster cafe racer conversion kit. So, I though I'd take a look around and see if anyone else was doing one, but  found instead this Phil Little Racing "SXR" Sportster kit. It is designed for year models 1986 and up.

They've got a good slideshow gallery of customer builds based on this kit... follow the link and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

While you're at it, take a look at our Mert Lawwill Sportster street tracker post from awhile back.

         

Cool Triumph Bobbers Blog

Vintage Triumph Thunderbird Bobber

Just stumbled onto this great blog dedicated to Triumph bobbers and flattrackers. Lots of photos of cool customs. Check it out.

Mert Lawwill's Harley-Davidson Streettracker Special

Mert Lawwill was a sensation in the glory days of AMA dirt track racing as a member of Harley-Davidson's racing team. He won the AMA Number One plate in 1969. In those days the championship spanned oval dirt track (mile, half-mile, and shorttrack), TT events, and roadracing... to take the Number One plate a rider had to be versatile and win races in all those disciplines. Mert even starred in Bruce Brown's epic On Any Sunday motorcycling documentary of 1971, along with motorcycling enthusiast, Steve McQueen. 

In addition to being a great rider, Mert is an outstanding mechanic and designer who tuned and maintained his own dirttrack race machines. Since his retirement from racing, he has designed and marketed his own line of high-performance mountain bikes; in fact his Lawwill Pro Cruiser, released in 1978, was the first production mountain bike on the market. When his friend and Harley teammate, Chris Draayer, the "Stormin' Mormon", lost a hand in a racing accident, Mert designed and fabricated a prosthetic riding hand that allowed Draayer to continue riding and even racing. Mert has since refined the design and continues to manufacture it to this day.

A few years back, Cycle World did a feature piece on Mert's plan to bring a limited production run of Sportster-based streettrackers to market (unfortunately, I can't find it online at the magazine's website). Doing the post below about Mule Motorcycles brought that back to mind, so I thought I'd go see what I could find to share here with you. I found this very good video below where one of his streettracker customers shows off the bike, and Mert describes its design and construction in quite a bit of detail. Note his unique rear suspension design, and the XR-750 like cylinder heads.

By the way, some new things that I learned doing the research for this post: Mert is the only person who is in both the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. I also learned that his son Joe Lawwill is a major mountain biking figure in his own right, as a racer, designer, and instructor.

Yamaha XS650 Twin Lives On

Mule Motorcycles Yamaha XS650 Streettracker

Doing some background research for the streettrackers post below got me to rethinking the Yamaha XS650 twin this weekend... I wasn't really much impressed with it back in the Seventies, when it was Yamaha's answer to the Triumph 650 and 750 Twins, but I am looking at it now in a different light.

Back in those days I loved Triumph Bonnies and, even more so, was obsessed with Norton Commandos --- I've owned three --- so I didn't have the time of day for what I viewed then as just a soulless, mass-produced knockoff of one of the most-beloved Britbikes. Now I have to say that the XS650 has had real staying power, there are still thousands of them on the road, here and all around the globe.

One of the primary reasons, besides their quality, reliability, and low cost is, I think, the fact that they are so versatile, that they readily lend themselves to customizing in different styles: streettrackers, bobbers, cafe racers, and choppers. Quite a thriving aftermarket has grown up around them and is going great guns to this day --- see, for example, the popular streettracker conversion kits from Omar's Dirt Track Racing.

The folks at 650Motorcycles.com have an entire website devoted to the XS650, with huge galleries of XS650s in every kind of style mentioned above.  If you've got one ---  stock, custom, whatever --- you can post pics of your own there.

Update: I just found this site called XS650.com, totally dedicated to the XS650. A lot of good info on accessories for the Yamaha.

Mule Motorcycles Streettrackers

Mule Street Tracker Based on Modern Triumph

Richard Pollack of Mule Motorcycles is one of America's most talented custom bike designers and builders. He is a highly skilled craftsman. His bikes have often been featured in Cycle World and Barnett's magazines. Street Trackers are his self-declared specialty.

 He's versatile, building bikes based on Harley Sportster engines, the new Triumph, and vintage Yamaha XS650s (for all you Kenny Roberts fans). If you've got the inclination and the dough, Richard will build you a bike to order.

UPDATE: We've got a new post about the new Mule "Brighton" Triumph Cafe Racer. 

Here's a Cycle World video that features Richard's XR1660 street tracker, "The Punisher."