Retrobike

IT’S been like 1989 all over again for this retired motorcycle road tester, with not one but two new bikes sharing space in the shed with my old dungers. Thirty years ago it was the norm. Not that I miss it. I was never the fastest rider on the block

BLACKTRACK Motors is a bespoke custom motorcycle manufacturer in Luxembourg in western Europe, designing radical one-off cafe racers then manufacturing them in small runs of no more than four per model for a wealthy and discerning clientele. Founder

AUSSIE Marc Roissetter is a motorsports consultant in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where he campaigns a ZX6R Kawasaki race bike and is accumulating a small but diverse collection of custom bikes. Amazingly, this is his first Ducati. “I was looki

EVERY so often a manufacturer conceives a new model that’s mostly unlike anything anyone did previously — and in doing so invents a new kind of motorcycle. Think BMW with its dual-purpose GS models, Ducati with the Monster, or Yamaha with the origina

I FIRST spied Steve Doherty’s ‘Dirtbag’ a year ago, three weeks into the build. His goal was the 2018 Deus Ex Machina Bike Build-Off, but when word got out it had been postponed, he immediately stopped work on it to concentrate on something else (he

IT is a measure of how serious Polaris is to re-establish Indian as a genuine contender to Harley-Davidson’s position as the quintessential American motorcycle that they developed, from scratch, a race bike just for American Flat Track racing, the qu

HONDA was seeking a retro/ custom vibe with its new naked CB1000R on its general release in 2018, and encouraged the Swiss distributor to hold a custom CB1000R competition to be held in conjunction with the 2019 Swiss Moto Show in Zurich. This here i

YAMAHA’S tiny RD200 is an unlikely choice for an elite show bike, and Alan Wells from Bunbury south of Perth would be the first to agree. But build it he did, and the story behind it is as heart-warming as the finished result is spectacular, good eno

THIS is another bike I’ve been hanging on trying out for some time now, Kawasaki’s most recent on-again, off-again incarnation of its 1965 W1 vertical twin, itself a development of the earlier BSA A7. The much revamped 2019 W800 Cafe is nothing like

IT was a big weekend in London at Tobacco Dock, with the 10th Bike Shed Custom & Shed Build Show competing for spectacle with a round of the British Superbike Championship and any number of summer music festivals. Yet more than 17,000 bodies came and

NORTON Commandos are not exactly thick on the ground but some models are rarer than others. Lenny Norton’s 750 SS (for Street Scramber, not Super Sport) is amongst the rarest. Just 400 were built in 1971, all of them exported to the US. An unknown nu

WE often hear enthusiasts saying they’ve been riding bikes “forever”. Stephan Lofting from Sydney’s northern beaches is a candidate for sure with a 55-year-long fascination with motorcycles. “I played on and around my dad’s bikes from the age of six,

PERSONALLY, the all-new pair of Royal Enfield 650 twins has been the most anticipated release of the year, and not because it’s the first Enfield twin to be made in half a century. My reasons were closer to home. I fell hook, line and sinker for the

BMW Motorrad has been on a mission lately with lots of bikes released on lots of different platforms. The R nineT in particular has spawned plenty of new models from cafe racers to scramblers, but the BMW design team pulled out all stops with the ama

DURING the Classic era of Grand Prix road racing in the 1950s and 60s, Czechoslovakia was the only Eastern Bloc country to mount a sustained challenge in the more prestigious larger capacity classes to first Western European, then, later on, Japanese

WHEN I was primary-school young, I was a subscriber to the King Arthur legend. Most princes were shiny and good people. They rescued damsels, slew dragons and generally upheld a whole bunch of noble ideals about chivalry. Fortunately, these illusions

Merlin Ladies Madison Cotton/ Kevlar Riding Jacket makes a bold, custom rider statement. This ladies chequered over shirt style jacket is designed to look and feel just like a heavy-duty cotton over shirt with an extreme abrasion resistant DuPont™ Ke