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If you’re going for a full-on, ground up build, you’d have probably bought a frame from one guy, forks & wheels from the next and so on. The piece of the pie that interests me in this post is tanks. I say this because in one way or another, I’ve been trying to find a good stream of motorbike tanks for years. They’ve either been ridiculous in price, ridiculous in design, or just plain ridiculous. I’ve gone from show to show, desperately trying to find the right look, shape, price, style and s …

Right now, I'm buzzing. I'm at the Intermot Motorcycle Show 2018, but I'm not buzzing for reasons you may think. It's quite quiet, albeit trade day. There are fewer halls with product to see. Why I'm buzzing is simple; this year focuses on quality, over and above quantity. Yes, it's the way things are going (see my previous blog for more insight), but I recently came to a realisation that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. You see, dear reader, there's a really healthy undercurrent of bi …

….back in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, when I started riding motorbikes and working in this industry, it was very strong. Dealers had a tonne of new bikes in a variety of colourways, and more than one model. Then, the licencing laws changed, and not necessarily for the better. To make matters worse, housing became less affordable, so people were (& very much still are) living at home until a fair bit older, so the guy who bought a 50cc at 16, 125cc at 17 and 250 by, say, 19 now no-longer …

On a motorbike, much like everywhere else, stuff wears out. Some stuff wears out quickly (tyres, brake pads, one’s patience with classic bikes), but other stuff takes time. Forks pit, suspension loses its bounce, paint fades, and switchgear, as if possessed by Beelzebub himself, just stops working. Yes, you’ll take them apart, clean their contact points, ride around for another little while in perfect happiness, but mark my words, they’ll fail again soon afterwards. Due to this modern and …

During a build, one of the things that I’ve noticed is often left as an afterthought is your seat. Usually, what happens is that you plan the build, build it, go over-budget, swear a lot, finish it in the nick of time and then either make changes, ride round on it for a while, or sell it because you’re bored, or want to start a new project. However, changing the seat, for some really quite strange reason, is a somewhat cathartic process. It’s not just the pampering of your hardened buttock …