Table of contents for Issue 49 in Retrobike

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…

Calling a bike a Bobber nowadays has become as ubiquitous a term as Café Racer or Street Tracker, as successive manufacturers rush to jump on a potentially profitable commercial bandwagon. But Fred Walmsley, 76, is old enough to remember the genuine Bobbers first time round, after they were invented in the USA post-WWII (see DNA sidebar), and after toying with the idea of building one for the past 50 years, he finally went and did so in the well-equipped workshop attached to his farmhouse outside Preston, on the edge of the Lancashire fells. Except, it’s not a Bobber, but The Fredder – as in, built by Fred, not Bob, using an array of Norton parts to create a cut-‘n’-shut streetlegal vintage racer with heaps of attitude. This Anglo-American concoction sits…

Technical SUSPENSION FOR MODIFIED BIKES Motorcycle suspension is absolutely crucial to a bike’s ride and handling, probably second only to having a decent set of properly inflated tyres. If you’ve got an older bike, there’s a really good likelihood the shocks and fork springs are sagged-out and in need of replacement, but there are also fork seals, linkage bolts, swingarm bushes, bearings and seals that could do with a re-fresh… and while none of this is a big challenge to a mechanic with a reasonable workshop, there are challenges for DIY. “Don’t expect a classic machine to be able to do what a 2023 one will do. That is not to say nice improvements and upgrades cannot be made, but a bike from yesteryear is exactly that, a bike with…

BACK PAGE MCILWRAITH ODD COUPLES What’s that thing?” I asked myself in a pleasantly boozy haze as I waited with my girl for the 423 bus to take us home from her birthday dinner. No drink-driving/riding for me, I’m a firm believer in drink-bussing. Anyway, parked by the bus stop was this very bright red Honda. It turns out it was a 450 SuperMoto. Despite looking at first glance like a trail bike, it had road tyres front and rear, and the front wheel was much smaller than the usual big black hula hoop they fit to dirt bikes. This was a city weapon. And it was so very ugly-pretty in the way of modern bikes. Ugly in that wherever you looked there were either sharp angles or pipes of…

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…

"…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…

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…

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…

Although never selling in big numbers Down Under, Cagiva’s Mito was one of the longest-lived and biggest-selling machines ever produced by the company. From 1989 until the increasingly stringent emission laws killed off the two-stroke road bike in 2012, the Mito was one of the bikes to own if you were young and wanted to go fast in Italy. The owner of this bike, Glen, would have owned one if he’d been Italian.The 48-year-old general manager has been into bikes since he was 12 and dreamed of owning a Mito, but it didn’t happen when he was young… now he owns some two-strokes more commonly found in Australia including a Honda NSR250 (MC28SP) and Suzuki RGV250 as well as a Harley and Honda VTR1000SP-1. “I’ve always wanted a Mito since…