Month : December 2022

Miki is 26 years old, compact in size, but rides with a confident, easy strength. Her crew blasts around Beijing on near identical Zero Engineering Type 6 motorcycles; 92.63 cubic-inch S&S Shovelheads with Baker six-speeds. The geometry of the Type 6 works for smaller riders like Miki. A rigid Gooseneck frame with a 33.2-degree rake drops the frame four inches from the street, and a mere 26 inches from seat to street. The classic Zero design Springer front end and larger 5.00-16 tires harken to a nostalgic past, while the bike’s modernized, long wheelbase and narrow width works wonders for...

Of the 800,000 miles of thoroughfare winding across the islands of Japan, there’s only one five mile stretch where you can drive a vehicle on a public beach (legally, at any rate). It’s called the Chirihama Nagisa Driveway, and for 363 days of the year, it’s a serene little strip of coastline and a popular destination for tourists and beach goers. For two very special days of the year, however, that serenity is replaced by the sweet music of straight-piped race bikes, while this smooth patch of sand is converted into a drag strip like no other. We’re talking about...

It’s just a couple of days to Christmas—and if you still don’t know what to get yourself, maybe a kit to transform your Honda CT125 is the answer. After all, it’s been a long 365 days, and to be honest, you deserve it. The Honda CT125 Hunter Cub is cute AF out the box, but if anyone knows how to mod the absolute daylights out of it, it’s K-Speed. This time around, they’ve used the CT125 as a test bed to develop a set of bolt-on parts, so that you can do it yourself. The only thing K-Speed doesn’t supply,...

While many motorcycle brands are still struggling to meet manufacturing demands, Royal Enfield is flourishing. Not only have they been consistently releasing new models, but they’ve been commissioning some amazing custom builds as well. The latest is brought to us by Crooked Motorcycles in Germany; a Royal Enfield Scram 411 turned supermoto, with some impressive details. Since the build was commissioned by Royal Enfield, the the project essentially had two goals. It had to express the creative drive of the builders behind Crooked, and it had to highlight the Scram 411 as a platform. This meant getting the most visual...

The numbers have been crunched, and the results are in. And as usual, our annual roundup of the most popular custom bikes on Bike EXIF is both enlightening and eclectic. The ten machines listed here are those that made our servers work the hardest in 2022. This ranked selection is purely data-based. We take our website stats and look at social media engagement, add everything up and voila! By its very nature, our top 10 also acts as a litmus test of sorts for the custom scene. It tells us that the café racer trend is still alive and well,...

Kids are impressionable, especially when motorcycles are involved. That magical combination of sound, smell and danger has a way of imprinting itself on young minds. But Kyle Harvey didn’t just dream of bikes as a child—he practically grew up with them. Kyle’s trade is tool and die making, but his passion is building bikes. His father, Garth Harvey, got Kyle and his brother into bikes at a young age; as soon as they could start their old man’s vintage motorcycles, they were riding them. Living in Edenvale in South Africa’s Gauteng province, the boys also had direct access to the...

The MT-10 SP is a compact, powerful, sophisticated machine that sits at the top of Yamaha’s Hyper Naked range. (Photos by Joseph Agustin) Gracing the cover of Rider’s October 2022 issue was the Yamaha MT-10, a thrilling naked sportbike based on the YZF-R1. I had the privilege of riding the MT-10 at the press launch in North Carolina, and afterward, Yamaha loaned us an accessorized version for further testing (we’ll have a report in a future issue). Related: 2022 Yamaha MT-10 | Video Review Yamaha also offers an up-spec version called the MT-10 SP. Priced at $17,199 – a $3,000...

Our guest on Episode 51 of the Rider Magazine Insider Podcast is Forrest Hobbs, who took a “purist” approach to completing the TransAmerica Trail. Hobbs lives in Denver, Colorado, and he bought a 1,200cc Yamaha Super Ténéré adventure bike, rode it 2,000 miles to Nags Head, North Carolina, rode the entire 6,200 miles of Sam Correro’s TransAmerica Trail, added a couple thousand miles along the way to visit friends and family, and then rode from Port Ord, Oregon, back home. Over 73 days, he logged over 12,000 miles. Hobbs used only roll charts for navigation and didn’t even have a...

The online classifieds of the world are littered with basket cases that may or may not make good donors for custom motorcycle projects. But how often do you stumble upon a rolling chassis sporting a bespoke titanium frame, a Ducati 1000 DS motor and a smattering of track-spec goodies? And how often is it a bike that was previously featured on Bike EXIF? The first time we laid eyes on this Ducati, Icon Motosports had turned it into a wild track beater for their design director, Kurt Walters. Now, over a decade since its first rebuild, Tony Prust at Analog...