Whoever coined the phrase “he’s good with his hands” had definitely met Mike Gustafson from Monnom Customs. Mike is a furniture maker by trade but can build pretty much anything he puts his mind to – especially custom motorcycles. This is a little film about Mike and his love of motorbikes – both dirt and street. “The film came about when a local Des Moines, Iowa filmmaker who has a small production company called Deft contacted me asking if I would be willing to work with him on a small video shoot centering around the bikes that I build” says Mike. “Bruce’s background is primarily in short film and documentary style shoots about regional artists.  I signed on and once we started talking about a few directions to go it was clear that this would be a larger production than originally thought.”

“I felt it was important to focus on three things during the shooting of the footage, the process of bike building, riding these bikes on the highway and also riding dirt bikes. Dirt bikes and cafe racers are two completely different animals. The bikes I build are as clean and perfect as I can make them, whereas dirt bikes are anything but. Street bike riding is meditative and introspective, dirt bike riding is athletic and quite vulgar, in the best sense of the word.”

We think Deft has done a great job capturing the different sides of motorcycling and bike building. The film also captures all the different materials Mike uses to build his bikes which are very different to the traditional bike builder – although they all share many of the same design principles and techniques.

Grab a coffee or a beer and sit back and watch this great little film. Be sure to subscribe to the Pipeburn channel as we start to release more moto films.