Your Ride

Selling a custom bike that you’ve poured your heart and soul, your blood, your sweat, and often your tears over, can be a very traumatic experience, and one that can haunt you for years. Words: Nik Pics: FD Dave How built a Triumph TR7 (the bike, that is, not that horrible cheese-wedge of a car)…

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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 first was featured in BSH),…

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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 ask how we find all…

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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: 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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