Some people’s design criteria are really easy – Richy wanted his next chop to have black spoked wheels, and a ‘beep-beep’-style squeezy bulb horn. The rest of the design was up to me… Words: Ger Conlon Pictures: Ian Shipley This is the second fancy chop I’ve built for him (the
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Juha ‘Raiza’ Raitio from Turku, Finland, works at a friend’s custom bike shop, but often goes there in the middle of the night to work on his personal projects undisturbed. No wonder he usually creates half a dozen new bikes every year! Words: Charley Charles Pictures: Siwer Ohlsson Some people
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Cast your minds back to last summer, and the issue of Back Street Heroes in which we ran a bike built by the father and son team of Norman and Louie Hartley of Deathgrip Custom Cycles – the stunning purple Panhead that they took to Born Free in California. Words:
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Too many stunning custom bikes seem to just disappear off the face of the planet as soon as they’ve been featured – bikes that you’d give your eye teeth (and any other ones required too) to own seem to vanish without trace after having their few minutes in the sun.
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You can build custom bikes out of almost anything. Most people, though, don’t start with a lawnmower… Words: Dave Manning Pics: Simon Everett Lawnmowers amuse me; partly because of the contrast between extreme reliability (always starting, never any issues) and extreme pain-in-the-arse unreliability (never ever starting when you really want
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Quite astoundingly, there’re still people who think that building any custom motorcycle involves an inordinate amount of money and nuclear physicist-levels of engineering knowledge and ability. Words & pics: Dave Manning Of course, while there are some bikes that have indeed cost their owners huge sums of cash, the greater
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This is another bike that was originally built in England and’s made its way, via a roundabout route, over the Irish Sea to the Emerald Isle, and now lives happily in the land of leprechauns, rain and very nice Guinness.
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Frank Sinatra may’ve been the originator of the song My Way, but for a lot of people the definitive version is Sid Vicious’ punk reworking of the crooner’s classic.
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This particular motorcycle started life as, and still is really, a Coventry-Eagle; a bike so rare these days that most of us, if we’ve ever actually seen one.
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In all the years I’ve ridden bikes, right back to when I was 13, I’d never had a proper road bike. I know, I know, shocking, isn’t it?
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