Cruisers

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: Dave Manning Pictures: Garry Stuart…

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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. This one, though, came back……

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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 them to and you’re tight…

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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 majority of custom bikes cost…

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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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Back in September 2012 I’d just bought a ’57 GMC step-side truck, when I bumped into an old friend who told me he’d been to look at a 45 chop advertised in the window of an ice cream van on the edge of Morecambe Bay. Of course, where else do you find them? Words: Adrian…

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