Retrobike

ON GOING RETRO EDITORIAL ROCKIN' AN R 18… Another issue of Retrobike and it’s chock-full of interesting bikes, from the old to the new, but all with a bit of Retro style. I would have loved to have included the BMW R 18 Roctane, but I’ve just returned from the Aussie launch of the machine and there wasn’t time to include a feature. However it’s a very interesting machine. For a start there’s not a lot of plastic: it’s a big, heavy, naked bagger with lots of steel and aluminium and finished in three different dark colours. And it’s been built for you, gentle reader – someone who likes to modify bikes. BMW has included what it likes to call ‘Conversion Friendly Architecture’, which basically means efforts have been made…

Over three days in May, the London Bike Shed Moto Show at the Tobacco Dock warehouse exhibition space came together, with over 17,000 vistors coming in to view more than 300 custom bikes. The bikes may have been the headline feature, but five live bands, five barbers, 16 tottooists and a whole lot more entertainment, food and drink helped make this one of the biggest and best custom bike events in the world. "SIMON’S FIRST MOTORCYCLE BUILD IS OF A BIKE HE’S OWNED FOR 40 YEARS…" Professionals, semi-professionals and shed builders had raced to get bikes finished, detailed and transported to display in central London, where visitors could enjoy the quality of the builds, the chilled environment, and the added bonuses of a few bars plus rare, unusual and off-beat…

Choosing a platform to start a custom build is fraught – there are no simple answers to the question, “what bike”? New bikes are generally too expensive, too complicated, too modern and too much. The price of classics is getting out of hand, and the price of parts sometimes quite crazy. So many riders choose cheap bikes, but soon enough they get popular and then prices start to go crazy again… witness what’s happened recently with the Yamaha XV750, Honda CX500 and BMW K 100 – all have gone from being unsaleable junk to ‘project bikes’. Royal Enfield has noticed this trend and so it’s building bikes which are affordable to most serious bike builders to start with a brand-new motorcycle, and the latest machine is also one of the…

With a customer looking for a naked classic for getting around Warsaw, Poland, workshop 86 Gear Motorcycles went looking for something suitable, finding a 1978 BMW R 100 S in Germany. “Our customer was already a keen BMW enthusiast, and an owner of a modern BMW 1200 GS, so he was looking for a lighter machine based on an air-cooled boxer motor of the past era,” Alex Ilcewicz from 86 Gear told Retrobike. The name of the shop comes from the colloquialism to ’86’ … get rid of or dump something. "WE ARE THE ENTHUSIASTS WHO RESTORE THEM TO THEIR FORMER GLORY…" "…THE BRAKES ARE HAVE NOTICEABLY IMPROVED STOPPING POWER…" “Most of the bikes we work on have been ’86ed’ – found in someone’s garage in a pitiful state, worn…

"…THE SOUND OUT OF THIS BIKE IS AS GOOD AS YOU’D IMAGINE" Earlier this year, insurer Shannons and Queensland custom shop Purpose Built Moto put together a video series, the Shannons Dream Bike Build – this is the story behind that bike and how it came to be the focus of a video series. PBM didn’t build a bike for the series, but rather asked one of their customers, Scott, if he’d be happy to have his bike featured, which he was. Scott was after a 1970s middleweight Honda four – a CB500 or CB550. “From the outset we had a vision in mind that would deliver Scott a motorcycle which would stop traffic with its looks, and blast past it with how it performed. I always bang on about…

Heavily corroded, not running with many damaged or missing parts, it’s kind-of a wonder this R 65 isn’t still a pile of junk rotting away in someone’s backyard. It’s even less likely to have been brought back from the dead when you know the owner, 27-year-old Francky Viegas, had just finished building an R80 classic racer… but he couldn’t ride it on the street as he was still stuck on a LAMs licence at the time. “My dad proposed the idea of building an R65 to satisfy my itch for wanting to ride a boxer engine motorcycle, which eventually led me to being attracted to the smaller engine capacity for the purpose of building a more agile, board-track racer-inspired build,” Francky told Retrobike. His dad had actually bought two R…