Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 38 i Built

PHOTOGRAPHY Leigh Dedhar Ben Norton, 36, works as an engineer with a Formula One team but spends his evenings building bikes. And unlike the huge clinical facility at work, his home workshop is a single garage, which is where this supercharged BMW came from. It’s is based on a very tired 1992 R100RT Mono and is called ‘R107K’: R for R series airhead; 107 from the Siebenrock big bore 1070cc kit; and K for Kompressor… So why a BMW – and why supercharged? The BMW engine layout and ‘agricultural-ness’ has always fascinated me. A friend and I both started our first bike builds at the same time. I chose a BMW R80RT and he chose a Ducati Monster. I ended up finishing the R80 before he finished his Ducati so…

PHOTOGRAPHY SKM We love the aggressive stance of Sebastien Vernaison’s Old School Racer. It’s based on a 1980 Kawasaki KZ650 and that shark’s mouth artwork adds to the combat-ready look of a cafe racer about to do battle on the roads of Brittany. Seb Kustom’s work has been featured in Built before – see #35 – so you might recall he has no set style and is happy building street scramblers, choppers or an uncompromising custom classic cafe racer like this. The bike’s artwork is very much part of custom culture. Its origins go back to WW2 when the design was used as nose art on fighter aircraft. In 1942 Life magazine featured the First American Volunteer Group, the so-called ‘Flying Tigers’ of the Chinese Air Force, who flew their…

PHOTOGRAPHY Ellie Doyle How did you get into customs? I had always admired them – choppers back in the day with old British engines or Harleys. I always wanted to do one but never had the patience and I’m a bit of a bodger. My first job was an agricultural mechanic so bodging is sort of built in. What brought about the change? The pandemic gave me a lot more time and now I’m old I have more patience too. I thought it’s time to give it a go. I really like the street scramblers/flat tracker look so thought that’s the direction I’d go in. I have a Cheney BSA and love the polished aluminium – and the minimalistic look – so my plan was to build something along those…

PHOTOGRAPHY Indian Motorcycle This is a significant milestone – Paul Cox and Keino Sasaki haven’t worked on a build together since their tribute bike built for Indian Larry, the legendary customiser who died in 2004. Despite having not collaborated for well over a decade, the pair swiftly fell back into the groove when they created this bike for trailblazing tattoo artist Nikko Hurtado. “The Chief was already a little bit retro,” says Paul, “but with modern touches that would make a cool version of an early chopper. When Keino and I spoke about the project, we already knew how the other thinks and works, so it only took five minutes of brainstorming to basically design the entire bike.” Working from the simple, bobbed lines of the stock Indian Chief, Paul…

“I’ve only ever worked for two other companies, and both were historic classic names,” says BSA boss Ashish Joshi, who worked for Royal Enfield and then Triumph before taking on the BSA challenge. He explains how the new bike came about, and what we can expect next… When did you and the team begin work on the development of the new BSA Gold Star 650? We started late in 2017. They’ve been designed and engineered in Britain, so most of the development work has taken place in the UK. Why did you choose to produce a 650 single, rather than a 650 twin or a 500 single like the original? Because we wanted to relaunch BSA with a motorcycle bearing the name and heritage of its most famous model, and…

PHOTOGRAPHY E2 Studios “SOMETIMES THE METAL GUIDES YOU” The bike you see here is a 1998 Suzuki GSF1200 Bandit called ‘Sanzoku’, (Japanese for bandit). that took Alexander Yiannopoullos five months to build. “I chose this model as the platform because I believe it encapsulates many of the structural aesthetics and performance requirements wanted for this genre of bike,” he said. Alexander runs Motomilo, a custom workshop in London. He studied Transport Design at Coventry university, with his final thesis being a concept motorcycle. He then embarked on a career as freelance product designer, but he was always destined to return to bikes. He bought his first bike 20 years ago, a Honda VFR400, and has been riding ever since. “About five years ago I became weary of my career path…

PHOTOGRAPHY Ruben del Valle Producciones La Guapisima, which means the beautiful one, has been designed and fabricated for sprint racing,” explains Pepo Rosell, the boss of Spanish custom powerhouse XTRPepo. “The aim is to race it at Glemseck 101 in Germany, and at Wheels and Waves in Biarritz. The goal was to make a bike with a strong 70s style and was inspired by the US drag bikes of that era. The livery is very LSD-influenced so it’s very American!” Pepo used a Ducati Pantah 600TL frame fitted with a Cagiva Elefant 900 V-twin. And it’s no ordinary engine – it comes from a Cagiva Elefant Marathon that was raced by Spaniard Jordi Arcarons, a six times Dakar podium finisher with four of those podiums riding a Cagiva Elefant between…

PHOTOGRAPHY Michael McCabe, Bobby Garey The bar-hopping scene in Brooklyn New York hit its sweet spot between 2007 and 2014 and was sustained by Works Engineering, a complex of studio and workshop space. Works was full of Harleys, German, Brit and Japanese bikes and you’d work all day at your studio doing creative stuff, then scream off to Ray Abeyta’s place, Union Pool, Hotel Delmano, Jessie’s No Name, Myles’ Lady Jay’s or Erik’s Matchless Bar to tip a couple pints with your lads. Life was very good. Young creative people lived and worked on the cheap in big, rough post-industrial studio spaces where everyone twisted wrenches, shared ideas and expertise. Bobby Garey and Ray Abeyta had studios at Works Engineering where they painted fine art canvases and customised their motorcycles.…

PHOTOGRAPHY Del Hickey “IT’S REWARDING TO HAVE TRIED SOMETHING DIFFERENT” It’s funny how new friends can affect your motorcycle choices. A couple of years ago I met a bloke called Kevin who lived down the road and he instigated a massive change in direction of my bike choices. Previously I’d been happily restoring and preserving British veteran and vintage bikes, including marques such as Douglas, BSA, Ariel and Scott. Scott motorcycles are my passion (I have two). I love their sound and I’m always amazed at how advanced they were for their time. But for my next project, I wanted to try something a little different. Kevin owns custom an XS650 and I tagged along with him to some custom bike shows, which I’d not done before. It was here…

PHOTOGRAPHY Leon, Flat Out Creative Our client Nick decided he wanted a retro project so he bought a 44-year-old Honda CB550 which ran but hadn’t been on the road for a while and looked a bit sorry for itself. But then work and a house move got in the way, so Nick asked us to take on the project. The brief was for a ‘Brat Style’ pared-back build that he could take his wife on the back of. He wanted the tank paintwork to loosely resemble the original colour scheme too. The first job was to strip off the unwanted parts then send the bike to OS Pipes in Staffordshire for the fabrication of the new stainless 4-into-2 brushed stainless exhaust system. Once back, we fabricated a new, shorter rear…

PHOTOGRAPHY Indian Motorcycle Build inspiration comes in many forms, but this is the first time we’ve heard of it originating from a trainer – the newly released Jordan AJ4 Retro Tour Yellow. The brief was provided by Titulo Sneaker Boutique and the building was done by Danny Schneider of Hard Nine Choppers. “As soon as I saw the FTR when it was revealed back in 2019 I knew I had to have one,” says Danny, an ex-pro motocross rider. “Normally, it takes me some time to get used to a new bike, but when I started riding the FTR, we clicked immediately. The frame set-up, the riding position and the stance of the wheels, it was no struggle at all to ride the FTR hard. “Of course, coming from the…

PHOTOGRAPHY Del Hickey The Honda Cub (aka Super Cub) is the world’s most popular motor vehicle – over 100 million have been built since 1958. It’s a personal transportation icon, comparable only to the Model T Ford, Volkswagen Beetle, Land Rover and Jeep. The bike is so instantly recognisable it was the first vehicle in Japan to be granted a three-dimensional trademark, and in the 1960s became the centrepiece of Honda America’s famed marketing campaign proclaiming that: ‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda.’ But as well as being the most-produced motor vehicle ever, the Super Cub has now become the basis for an improbable craze exploding worldwide. The cult for creating Custom Cubs took off in Japan, and then spread around Asia and beyond. Brian Ricketts is one…

By the time you were born in 1975, BSA had been dead for three years. So what’s the background that allowed you to create the Gold Star? I’m a designer by trade, but although I was born in London I moved to the Midlands when I was very young. So I grew up in the Coventry area, and I’ve been Midlandsbased for most of my life –I grew up in what used to be BSA’s back yard, and having always loved motorcycles I was aware of BSA’s significance and heritage. I went to Coventry University where I did Automotive Design, then in 1996 I started at a company called Renfrew Group, where I began working with clients on developing bikes. But eventually in October 2008 I and some other guys…

PHOTOGRAPHY Kott Motorcycles In the very early days of Built magazine we ran a story on the Triumph that Dustin Kott built for Ryan Reynolds. Well, Dustin’s latest bike – complete with the cylinders facing the wrong way – is closely related with that project… “In 2015, Todd Wilson, the head of the special projects team at Triumph, gave this project to me as a measure of goodwill in exchange for my efforts with the Reynolds project,” says Dustin. “He was also curious to see if I had any ideas how to finish what Triumph started with the reversed head engine concept. “I received several boxes of parts with the Speedmaster motor along with a good luck handshake and a thank you. There was, thankfully, zero urgency so I didn’t…

PHOTOGRAPHY courtesy of Indian Motorcycle Go Takamine’s simple and effective Brat Style was formed from necessity: living in Japan in the late 1990s he needed to slice through Tokyo’s heavy traffic. And this latest build for movie star Nicholas Hoult (the Beast in X-Men, plus a starring role in Mad Max) lives up to Go’s philosophy. “For me bike culture started at school,” says Go. “Half of my class were bike crazy and that’s what shaped my life and direction. I learned a lot in the early days from friends and my local bike shop. Brat Style evolved from this, as did my shop. It’s about things being simple and effective and yet still feeling like a kid.” Having relocated his life and shop to California eight years ago, Go’s…

PHOTOGRAPHY Indian Motorcycle Carlos Torres’ monotone masterpiece takes the all-new Indian Chief Darkhorse into the stylised world of ‘Black and Grey’ fine art tattoos. Working from his Californian tattoo studio and fine art gallery, The Raven and The Wolves, Carlos has become one of the most highly awarded artists in the industry and specialises in black and grey realism and surrealism. The other two artists involved in the ‘Indian Motorcycle X No Regrets’ tattoo art collaboration include Mayonaize and Shige. Mayonaize is a contemporary fine artist specialising in incorporating calligraphy into his artwork. Graffiti has also been a major influence on him, creating an established profile in the Melbourne street-art scene. Shige is a skilled motorcycle engineer who taught himself tattooing in 1995 and has gone on to become a…

PHOTOGRAPHY BSA, AC Archive COMPUTER RENDERS Oberdan Bezzi 1950s STYLE, 2022 TECH On the left handlebar are two USB ports and there’s a power socket on the left-side rear downtube for an electrically heated jacket. You never got that on the originaql Goldie. Another big change is the brakes –a 320mm disc at the front with a twin-piston Brembo caliper and ABS. At the back is 255mm fixed disc with single-pot Brembo caliper. The service interval of 6200 miles is a tad better than the old one too… BSA is back! Almost exactly 50 years after the final machine rolled off the lines of its Birmingham factory in the summer of 1973, BSA has finally been revived. Named after the company’s most illustrious sporting model, the 2022 Gold Star was…

PHOTOGRAPHY Robert Taylor@ Alan Rourke’s interest in BMW was inherited from his father who had an R80 from new, and his dad’s 40 years of tinkering has clearly rubbed off. “My father is now in his 80s so I’ve taken over his R80 with the aim of keeping it in tip top condition,” says Alan, who lives on the Black Isle – the peninsula north of Inverness in Scotland. Alan’s owned many supermotos and trailies but he had a yearning to build something a bit different; a street scrambler based an old boxer twin. “I sourced an identical bike to my dad’s so I could keep all surplus parts as spares,” he says. “The bike came from the Shetland Isles and looked like it had spent a long time outside.…