Your Ride

While buying an already-built custom bike has some advantages – not having to spend endless hours making/fitting parts, waiting for suppliers or trying to understand the dark art of wiring or any of the other endless headaches involved in bike building – there’s one huge disadvantage; it’ll never truly be your bike! Words and pictures:…

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Pictures: Joseba Aguirre When describing the manner in which custom bikes are crafted, us eloquent wordsmiffs, like, are wont to use some fairly flowery language so as not keep repeating words like ‘built’, ‘made’, ‘welded up’ et cetera, et cetera. One of the most apt of these terms wot we use to describe the bending,…

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For years I’d been reading magazines and trawling the internet for cafe racers and found that with almost all of them I thought things like “I’d’ve done that like that” or “I wouldn’t’ve done it that way”, and so on and so on. We all do it, don’t we? There comes a time though when…

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Back in March this year I was contacted by a good friend who asked if I’d be interested in doing a Grand Moped Tour of southern Spain in October? Of course, the answer was ‘yes’ and so the hunt for a suitable bike to do it on began. Words: Ben Dyer; Pics: Simon Everett I…

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In 2010, Donna Kilby, a lifelong biker, was in the unusual position, for her anyway, of being without a bike. As someone who’s totally addicted to them, and made her living breaking Japanese ones for parts, this really would not do. Words and pictures: Lawrence Howes A trader offered her a 1984 Yamaha FJ1100; it had…

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Many years ago, Guy bought my much-loved green 1260 Bosworth big-bore EFE chop, writes Lin Jefford. He rode it, loved it, and then sold it. Almost instantly he regretted selling it almost as much as I did, but things have to move on to provide money and space for subsequent projects. He said then that one…

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Prior to 2004, most people in the world, even the biking world, when asked about Exile Cycles, went quieter than the bar in the Slaughtered Lamb. Now, though, ex-pat Brit Russell Mitchell’s company and bikes are among the most famous on the planet. Pictures: Garry Stuart You see, in 2004 Russ and Exile Cycles participated in…

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Remember those inline fours built in Great Britain under the Indian name a couple of decades ago? This is the guy who started the whole project back in the early 1990s under the name Wiking, with bikes based on 2000cc Volvo engines. Word and pictures: Charley Charles Sture Torngren of Stockholm, Sweden, is 71 years…

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When Kawasaki launched the W650, its take on the infant retro market that actually preceded Triumph’s relaunched Bonneville (1999 for the Kwak, 2001 for the Bonnie, according to Wikipedia), a lot of people didn’t realise quite how ‘retro’ it was. Pictures: Simon Everett You see, the ‘W’ in ‘W650’ refers to Kawasaki’s W1, W2 and…

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Steampunk, as any fule nose, is just about one of the most fashionable lifestyle sub-cultures around at the moment. Flat/street-trackers are equally as desirable. Put them together and what do you get? Well, this bike here actually… Chris Vincent, the owner and builder of the black BMW cafe racer from the last issue, had an…

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