They say that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but no one bothered telling Earth Motorcycles that. The Slovakian custom shop has just built an elegant and somewhat alluring café racer out of the most unlikely donor; a Yamaha Virago. It's not that Yamaha Virago café racers are uncommon—they're just really hard to get right. In stock trim, the Virago boasts one of the most awkward layouts in modern motorcycling. So it takes a shrewd approach, and a little left-field thinking, to massage it into shape. Earth Motorcycles circumnavigated those challenges, by choosing to highlight
There was a time when only two things wore raw shields of smoothed out aluminium, UFO invaders cutting through the
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A tracker-inspired Yard-Built Special from Italy... The Yamaha XV950, better known as the Star Bolt on US shores, is a Japanese cruiser with a 942cc air-cooled, fuel-injected 60° V-twin producing 51 horsepower and 59 foot-pounds of torque -- a proper rival, some say, for the Harley-Davidson 883
Motoshop Tonouchi has done it again. After grabbing attention with their retro BMW-inspired Sportster custom, they’ve created one of the tastiest XS650-based bikes we’ve seen for a while. The ‘Heritage Special’ reprises the monochromatic look, with sleek, perfectly judged bodywork—note the lovely curved panels under the bobber seat. The frame modifications accentuate the chunky, 654cc parallel twin motor and the gently flared exhaust system adds a low-key elegance. Not surprisingly, Tonouchi’s latest XS650 has just been profiled in issue 4 of the Japanese metric custom magazine Another World of Chopper—and I’m prepared to bet it’ll start spreading fast on the
Bold Motorcycles is the creation of two long-time friends, Pedro and João, who live in Sertã, Portugal -- located in the middle of the nation's longest, most mythical road: the Nacional 2. We were fortunate enough to feature their first build, a 1996 CB500 cafe racer dubbed "B001".Now th
Our latest custom motorbike crush is one of our favorite builds up to date, a 1978 Yamaha SR500 converted into a masterpiece by Chicago-based Powder Monkees. The bike was built in collaboration with Federal Moto, it was stripped to its essentials, fi
In the post-war period, the Minimalism movement took off, influencing heavily the visual arts, music, architecture and design. And if
With its inch-perfect frame, OEM-style bodywork, and period-correct graphics, you'd be forgiven for mistaking this Yamaha for a forgotten 90s factory prototype. But what it really is, is a completely bespoke machine with a Yamaha XS400 engine, a whole lot of innovative engineering, and a patented front suspension system. Oh, and it was built by a hobbyist in a 13-by-15-foot workshop in Slovakia. “The main idea of the build was to make it look as little like a custom bike, and as much like a factory bike, as possible,” says the mad scientist behind the project, Roman Juriš. “In purely
A tracker-inspired Yard-Built Special from Italy... The Yamaha XV950, better known as the Star Bolt on US shores, is a Japanese cruiser with a 942cc air-cooled, fuel-injected 60° V-twin producing 51 horsepower and 59 foot-pounds of torque -- a proper rival, some say, for the Harley-Davidson 883
You never forget your first motorbike, no matter how good or bad it was, that machine opened up your life
The Yamaha SR250 is the hardworking little brother of the inimitable SR400/SR500, many of the components are shared between the SR models making repairs
