February 3rd, 2012 | American Iron,Tracker |
The custom Sportster is one of those motorcycle varietals that can really go either way. I’ve seen beautiful examples and I’ve seen garish and raked out hack jobs that’ve made me want to set them alight, just to put them out of their misery.
This customised Sportster is one of the best I’ve seen in recent times, the combination of flat-tracker seat and rear cowling, 2-into-1 scrambler pipes, chain drive, boosted rear suspension, lowered front suspension, a hand-fabricated headlight cover/assembly and a series of parts additions from The Speed Merchant’s online catalogue have left the bike looking like a 70′s version of a modern hypermotard. And I think that’s a good thing, hell, I think it’s a great thing.
The Sportster was built by Brandon Holstein at Brawny Built for The Speed Merchant and the bike is now for sale via this store.
February 3rd, 2012 | Tracker |
Yamaha Scorpio 225 Deus Ex Machina
have a habit of producing off the wall customs, just when you think you’ve pigeon holed them, they go and create something like this and move the goal posts on you.
Surprisingly this bike, dubbed “The Mouse Trap” was produced by the Deus Sydney garage. We’ve become accustomed to seeing similar styled bikes built by Deus’ Bali based garage, largely intended for use belting around the island’s various beaches and often using the same Yamaha Scorpio 225 base model.
Some have taken to calling this style of motorcycle a “Beach Tracker” and I see the appeal in the name, the bikes have a lot in common with Flat Trackers though are clearly designed to be ridden everyday, often down a long beach with a surfboard strapped to the side.
For this build, Deus stripped the bike back to it’s bare essentials and de-lugged the chassis, they prefabricated the sub-frame, created a new battery box, made custom front and rear fenders, pulled off the shoes and added slightly fatter rubber front and back, they added a K&N filter, a custom alloy tank, the single exhaust tube was bolted to twin Laser reverse cone mufflers and a modified Nitro Heads seat was fitted.
Say what you like, Deus is thorough.
The Mouse Trap is now for sale at Deus Ex Machina’s “House of Simple Pleasures” in Camperdown, Sydney. Hit the link here to visit the website.
January 12th, 2012 | Tracker |
Triumph Bonneville Cafe Racer Dreams
Triumph Bonneville Cafe Racer Dreams
This is the latest build from Spanish shop Café Racer Dreams, which is starting to look like the southern European counterpart to the well-established Wrenchmonkees of Copenhagen. CRD #10 is called “Night Track”, and it’s a 2007 Triumph Bonneville. The mods are well-chosen, tightening up the aesthetics of the Bonnie and giving it a sharper, more retro look.
Triumph Bonneville Cafe Racer Dreams
Triumph Bonneville Cafe Racer Dreams
A K&N air filter feeds into the Keihin carbs, with gases exiting through a handmade two-into-one exhaust system terminated with a Supertrapp muffler. A mini headlight sits in front of Renthal Ultra Low bars fitted with enduro-style switchgear. The footpegs are custom, and the shocks from Hagon. Bobbed fenders and matte paint add to the dark, minimalist style.
Triumph Bonneville Cafe Racer Dreams
Like many of the best customs, this Bonneville looks deceptively simple—but that in itself is a difficult trick to pull off. And once again, Pedro García and co. have nailed it. Head over to the CRD website to see more of their work, or follow the progress of their builds on their blog.
Images by Cesar Serrano.
Triumph Bonneville Cafe Racer Dreams
Triumph Bonneville Cafe Racer Dreams
January 8th, 2012 | Tracker,xs650 |
Mule Yamaha XS650
Mule Yamaha XS650
Richard Pollock knows a thing or two about street-trackers. Doing business as Mule Motorcycles out of a converted two-car garage in suburban San Diego, he’s built about 100 trackers to date, and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, now that his full-time job as an aerospace fabricator has morphed into part-time consultancy, he has more time than ever to devote to two-wheelers, including doing R&D and prototyping for Streetmaster, a small Southern California speed house for new Triumph Bonnevilles.
Mule Yamaha XS650
Pollock’s bread and butter, though, are specials based on two powerplants: Harley-Davidson’s Evo Sportster V-twin and Yamaha’s venerable XS650, the so-called “Japanese Bonneville” and about as good an air-cooled parallel-twin as anybody has ever made. Mule’s latest build is an Mule Yamaha XS650 with a difference. Strictly speaking it’s not a street-tracker; there are touches of café-racer mixed in. Let’s call it, then, a “café-tracker.”
Another difference is that it was built to a price. The owner, an Australian, had a bottom line that was a good $10K below the usual $25,000 to $30,000 that Mule gets for a spokes-up, one-off creation. In retrospect, he should have said no to the budget build, but Pollock likes a challenge, so the Down Under XS was on.
A big chunk of change was saved by using a stock XS650 main frame rather than the heavily massaged, stressed-member unit Pollock usually employs for his Yamahas. Up front, conventional forks from a Buell M2 Cyclone were sourced inexpensively on eBay. Swingarm is from Yamaha’s mid-’80s Radian roadster. It conveniently bolts right up to the XS’s pivot area and is a nice upgrade from the spaghetti-thin stock arm.
Helping to give the Mule Yamaha XS650 its unique hybrid style is an aluminum Storz café-style “bread loaf” fuel tank. Intended to fit a Sportster, the tank needed its tunnel heavily reworked to work with the XS frame’s differently angled backbone. Because the owner wasn’t enamored with the usual kicked-up flat-track tailsection, Pollock grafted on the rear frame loop from a Wood-Rotax with its minimalistic, tightly drawn bodywork. Both tank and tail, looking like they were destined to be together, are finished in a simple paint scheme, a pearl-white and maroon take on the old Yamaha racing colors. Artwork on the gas tank is the company’s classic tuning-fork logo as envisaged by Salvador Dali.
Punched out to 750cc, the mix-n-match Mule Yamaha XS650 is now on its way to Australia. This may have been Pollock’s first café-tracker, but given the bike’s undeniable good looks it probably won’t be his last.
Mule Yamaha XS650
May 19th, 2011 | Tracker |
Unveiled today at the Quail Motorcycle Gathering in California was this tasty limited-edition Triumph street-tracker from a famous car-building shop. Best known for its traditional hot-rods, the So-Cal Speed Shop is adding motorcycles to its considerable repertoire with the “Miler,” a stripped-down special based around a modern Triumph Bonneville twin.
Getting hot-rod guys to do a bike was the brainchild of Richard Varner, CEO of a small start-up bike shop called Streetmaster that specializes in new Bonnevilles. So-Cal principals Pete Chapouris and Jimmy Shine have been involved with every aspect of the project, from clay mockups to metal finishes to the final assembly of prototype #1. Just twenty Milers will ever be built, with the first ten offered to existing So-Cal car customers. Production is scheduled for September 2011; price has yet to be finalized.
The bikes will be constructed in conjunction with Streetmaster, which builds Triumph specials and sells performance parts for Bonneville motors. The Miler’s 865cc engine—tuned to pump out 78 horsepower—benefits from Streetmaster’s cylinder-head porting, lightened flywheel, remapped ignition system, 39mm Keihin flatslide carbs and stepped, mid-level exhausts. Streetmaster also provided its lightweight, purpose-built frame and swingarm, while So-Cal was responsible for the aluminum fuel tank, tailsection, front numberplate/headlights and sidepanels, finished in the Speed Shop’s signature red paint with bare-aluminum accents.
“So-Cal Speed Shop started in 1946, catering to the hot-rod and dry-lakes crowd, and we’ve built hundreds of cars since then. But this is the first time we’ve put our name on a Triumph motorcycle,” said Chapouris. “The bare-bones street-tracker style made sense to us, but we really think of the Miler as a Deuce Hiboy Roadster with two fewer wheels.”
Stay tuned over the next few days, when we’ll be showing more exclusive images of bikes launched at The Quail.
