Back Street Heroes November 2025

Hello and welcome to this, the penultimate issue before we clock up the big 500. There’re a few changes this month – not massive ones (well, one is, but…), but big enough to warrant talking about anyway. First up, the eagle-eyed amongst you’ll notice there’s no Year in Custom Biking this issue, for which I will apologise, cos I’ve been so busy with roadtest bikes I haven’t even started any of mine. Y’see, because an event called the ABR (Adventure Bike Rider) Festival in June has gone massive in a really short time, all the manufacturers who give us bikes to test for our monthly feature’ve been withholding them so that they can use them as demos (or something, I’m not too sure really) at ABR, and that means that,…

IT was great watching the vintage hot-rods and beach-adapted bikes racing up and down the beach. Unfortunately, that came to an end (something to do with the owners of the beach having concerns over health and safety, or noise, or something), and it wasn’t until several years later I saw adverts for Race the Waves, a similar event, held on Bridlington Sands in Yorkshire. Now, Yorkshire is about four-and-a-half hours from me and, although I quite fancied going, I couldn’t be arsed with the travel. Fast-forward a few years, and I’d been talking to Sam Carlton, of Swamp Ape Motorcycles, and he said he was taking his BSH-featured triple-engine J.A.P. there, again, and that it was a great event. Suitably informed, I decided to go and, as you can probably guess,…

IN that article, there was mention of his previous bike, another asymmetrical Sporty called ‘Seahorse’, and I did say that we’d show you that ‘…in a few months’ but, somehow, that ‘few’ has turned into, er, 17… sorry about that. The secret to both The Great Divide and Seahorse is that while they are mind-bogglingly asymmetrical (or ‘weirdly wonky’ as someone at a show said to me earlier this year), the front and rear axles of both are completely in line and that means that, as long as they are, you can do what you like with the bits in between those two points. Seahorse, being the earlier bike, isn’t as radical as TGD with its differing length fork legs and impossibly sculpted ’bars, etc., but it’s still radical enough to’ve…

The show started some eighteen years ago and was, originally, held on the green in Laxey (where the famous Wheel is), and that was its home until the day the small bridge in the village collapsed. It was replaced, of course, but as the new one was too narrow to allow access by the emergency services, if they were ever needed, it was relocated to Peel on the other side of the island where it’s been ever since. Despite the cold and the damp, a steady stream of bikes headed in ‘til lunchtime, serenaded by local band Penthouse Dive playing classic rock tunes. The weather did, not long after, take a turn for the better, so the club unleashed the judges to pick the bikes for each of the twenty-two…

When it comes to customs, Simon at Mint Customs in Hertfordshire likes Harleys and doesn’t really like Japanese-engined… well, pretty much anything really – he’s a Harley man through and through. That meant that, one day, when a customer, Garfy, rolled up asking if he’d finish a build for him, one that had a 1200 Bandit engine in a HUC trike frame with some very, very trick Taylormade Wheels bits on it (massive billet split-rim wheels, late-model upside-down forks, monster wide yokes, one of Steve’s very neat little axle ensembles), he found himself suggesting they f**ked the Suzuki motor off… sorry, sorry, changed the Suzuki motor, for a four-speed Sportster one, almost without being able to help himself. Garfy thought about it for, ooo, about a second, and agreed and,…

Every last Sunday of June, the East Coast Harley Club hold their annual custom show at the G&D and, although I don’t go every year, every time I do it’s always a good day out. Current and ex-members’ve been featured in this ‘ere magazine time and time again over the years as the club has a long history of building and running older custom Harleys, and Brits, too, and one of their senior members told me this year that they were, and I quote, “a bunch of silly old sods who mess about with old motorcycles”… actually, that’s a complete fib – he didn’t say that at all; what he actually said was much more in the vernacular and couldn’t possibly be repeated here, dear reader, for fear of shocking…