1994 Suzuki DR650 Street Dracker - Blitz Motorcycles

Written by Ian Lee.

The French always seem to be on the forefront of fashion. Clothes, perfume, and now custom motorcycles. Not that I pay much attention to the first two. The latest fashion in custom cycles appears to be to use a dirt bike as the base for a build. Rugged, simple design makes for an excellent platform to build on, they’re cheap as well, and the ability to get that big bore thumper note all add to the desirability. Blitz Motorcycles knows this, and has used this thinking to the best of their abilities to create a level of custom rarely seen, all from the starting point of a simple trail bike. It just makes sense, oui?

Taking a 1994 Suzuki DR650, the bike was completely stripped down, and the frame shortened by 35cm. Added to the frame at this time was the electrical box, somewhere to keep all the important bits that make the bike spark, and all without adding bulk to the aesthetic. The frame was then powder coated in shiny orange, along with a few engine and brake components. This is what really shows the theme of the colour scheme, which Blitz describes as "Lemans GT40 on acid". 

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1977 Suzuki GS750 - 'Rusty Bitch'

Owning a motorcycle near the beach in Sydney only has one drawback. The salt from the nearby sea ends up travelling around the streets searching for anything made of metal to slowly destroy – and it doesn't discriminate. If you don't wash your bike regularly, this salty air quickly corrodes the parts on your bike that aren't made of plastic or aluminium. To most people, the prospect of having rust on their shiny pride and joy is probably the worst thing imaginable. Not to Lorenzo Rapparini from Bologna Italy. He loves rust. He loves the color and the organic nature of it – so much so that he decided to use it as a feature on his GS750, appropriately named 'Rusty Bitch'. 

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1980 Suzuki GN400 - Holiday Customs

It's hard to believe it has been over two years since we featured Holiday Customs first bike. Since then, they've attracted a lot of attention over the years for their fine wrenching work – in particular, their trademark Schwinn inspired Yamaha XS650. Jared from Holiday Customs has always been good at saving old bikes from extinction by recycling parts he finds around his garage. His latest project is this clean and simple single-cylinder Suzuki GN400. "I found the GN in Portland Oregon, but the bike shows some signs of being in Virginia at some point of its life." says Jared. "There's still a Virginia beach army parking sticker on the fork". Instead of removing the sticker, he decided to retain this little clue to the bikes history.

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Yamaha RD125

By guest writer Ian Lee.

Full length fairings. Small capacity engines. Pizza cutter tyres. All strike up images of 1970s motorcycle racing, but do these statements make you think of a fully registered streetbike? Bobby Costello, of Costello Fabrications, has done the ton in creativity and engineering to bring this build as close as possible to a full race bike, yet still be able to blast around town when the desire arises. 

Bobby is an allround bike builder/fabricator/welder/mechanic specialist. By day he works at Motoretta Atlanta, a Vespa dealership that also works on vintage motorcycles and mopeds. In his spare time he helps out 1977 mopeds, and Team Indigen, building the ‘ripping’ motor in Indigen’s Diablo motorbike. Bobby also finds time to run Costello Fabrications, a fabrication workshop that will build anything from exhaust headers through to bike frames to furniture. 

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Suzuki DR650 - Deus Bali

Bali is known as "the island with a thousand temples" but there's only one temple most moto monks will be interested in visiting on their spiritual pilgrimage to Bali, and that's the 'Deus Temple of Enthusiasm' - it's the place of worship for those that bow their helmet to the 'God in the machine'. And the latest machine from the Bengkel boys is this dirty back track Suzuki DR650. Compared to most countries like Australia and America, the DR650 is not a very common bike in Indonesia. As the saying goes 'they are rarer than rocking horse poo', thanks to the strict Indonesian import laws making the importation of larger displacement bikes a very expensive venture due to the huge import taxes. So when one comes up for sale, Deus try to snatch them up.

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Sérgio Teixeira's Suzuki GSX 750 - “Saudade”

If you took yr average 1950s cafe racer and ground it up in a giant sausage maker, what do you think would come out the other end? For those of you who answered a ‘bunch of ground metal with small pieces of rubber, vinyl and glass, all coated in a nice oily sauce,’ then technically you'd be right. Smart arses. But what I was alluding to was more of a distillation of the bike's Raison d'être in to something pure and unadulterated. In a traditional cafe racer's case, I'm guessing that what you'd get is a kind of ‘essence of honest speed.’ A substance that would characterise the scene's key traits of going as fast as bloody possible on a working-class, post-war English budget. Think those days are long gone? Think again, for as the GFC bites hard in Western Europe, there are still guys who want maximum bang-for-their-buck for as little buck as possible, and what they are coming up with still stirs the soul like their 50 year-old brethren. Here's one of them; Sérgio Teixeria's Suzuki GSX 750 cafe racer.

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1983 Suzuki GSX250 - Lil' Brat

Most of us have motorcycle moments that happen when we are younger that are etched in our memory forever. Moments when you first say to yourself that "one day I will buy a motorcycle like that". I had one of those moments when I was about 9 years old. I was in the back seat of my dads old Ford Falcon on a family holiday road trip to the Gold Coast when we were overtaken by a guy on an extremely loud Triumph Bonnie with one of the most beautiful girls riding pillion. In slow motion they rode past and I swear the girl blew me a kiss - I may have embellished this moment slightly over the years. Whatever the case, the memory is still so vivid. The British racing green tank on the Bonnie glistened in the sun, even more attractive than the blonde that was holding on for dear life. Around the same time, but in another country, a young Karl Reynolds also had one of these moments - just replace the cute blonde with some New Zealand farmers (bad visual?). "We used to go on holidays every year to an NZ coastal town called Pauanui" Karl says. "These local farmers ran a mini motorbike track where you could hire one for 10 laps. My first ever ride was on one of these, in a straight line, into a wall of hay bails. Took me a few goes to learn about something called steering. Ever since, I knew I'd own a bike one day." And this is the bike he's been thinking about since then...

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'78 Suzuki GT 250

Gandhi was a patient man. His commitment to non-violence saw him wait almost 50 years for freedom only to die less than 6 months after India was finally granted independence from British rule. Buddha is said to have once meditated under a bodhi tree for 49 straight days until he claimed to have attained enlightenment. And the Bible's Job refused to give up even after his family and life was taken away from him. Then there's the story of one David Ottesen, a man who's patience makes Job look like Russell Crowe. See dear readers, I promised good David a post on Pipeburn very soon after I shot the beautiful bike you see before you last Christmas. And I promised, and I promised... Soon, summer became Autumn, and the leaves fell from the trees, but did I do anything? Oh no, still I procrastinated and never made good on my empty words. But David never gave up. He persisted until the sheer weight of guilt began to crush me like a millstone. Then, and only then he told me that he planned to sell the bike. And the guilt became too much to bare. David, I'm truly sorry; anyone wanna buy a bike?

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1979 Suzuki GS1000

Ask yourself this question: Would your wife or girlfriend let you use her designer leather handbag to make a seat from? Well, Filip Bardy, the Slovakian owner and builder of this sweet GS1000 managed to convince his girlfriend to donate her handbag for a "higher purpose". You see, there aren't a lot of motorcycles or bike parts in downtown Slovakia. So Filip had to be resourceful, and if that meant chopping up his misses' 2010 spring/summer collection, then that's what he had to do. To be honest, black leather was soooo last season, anyway. 

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