Written by Martin Hodgson

Long before YouTube there was Claude Lelouch’s epic 8 minute masterpiece, C’était un rendez-vous, showing the French are as mad as the rest of us! Fellow Parisian Isidore Delgrosso shares that need for speed but prefers to get his kicks on two wheels. From his workshop MécaServices92 near the heart of the city, he utilises his engineering talent to produce some of the countries finest customs. Now he’s back with a ’90s Honda NX650 Dominator café racer that’s been touched in all the right places.

Written by Martin Hodgson | Photos by Nic Walker

Over the years we’ve noticed a common trend here at Pipeburn; some of the best workshops around the globe, large and small, have their origins in friendships formed over a love of motorcycles. Australia’s Sabotage Motorcycles is one such story, it began in the car park of a hardware store when two men met on their ’70s Honda’s and have gone on to produce some show stopping custom rides. Now they’re back with a truly unique creation, artistically formed by the pairs talented hands and lucid imaginations. It’s a 1926 Douglas EW with power from a little engine by the big H, to deliver one beautiful board tracker.

Written by Ian Lee.

The big single. The thumper. No matter how you refer to it, the large displacement single cylinder motor has been putting smiles on motorcyclists’ faces since the dawn of motorcycledom. The simplicity of the mechanics, the ease of working with one and (of course) the noise they make all add to the benefits of using a thumper bike in a custom build. Toma Customs, based in Brussels, has shown the quality of build that is possible when the right workshop has the right cycle on the bench. Utilising the Honda FMX650, Thomas Jeukens and the Toma’s crew have taken the plastic-wrapped Super Motard and released the urban tracker hidden inside.

This is a story older than time. A common predicament many of us have been in. You buy a donor bike with all the right intentions to build one of the coolest motorcycles the world has ever seen. But the days pass by and then the months pass by until reality hits and you know you aren’t ever going to finish this build. Whether it’s a lack of time or a lack of ability, the bike sits in the garage waiting for some love and attention. This is exactly what happened when a customer approached French garage Forge to build them a Dominator. The 1989 NX650 had been sitting in pieces for a year and the owner knew he wasn’t going to get it done, so he called Forge.

Gustavo from Pasquale and his dad are fucking legends.” That’s how our man Marlon described the family powerhouse that is Colombia’s Pasquale Motors, and he’s harder to impress than Vladimir Putin. We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the whole custom scene in Colombia looks to them…

In just about every ancient culture that spans the globe exists a mythology around the crow, and it almost always leads to death. So imagine yourself sitting alone in the middle of the night, stopped at a red light in the bad part of town, when as if from nowhere this blacked out harbinger of death rolls up beside you…

When you’re as good as suffolk’s Old Empire Motorcycles you don’t need to go hunting for work. Hell, their incredible history of customising classic motorcycles has customers practically begging them to create a bike. And that’s what’s happened with their latest creation, a 1976 Honda CB360…

Blame Akira. Blame Blade Runner. Blame Daft Punk. We have a rather unhealthy obsession with the limitless future of motorcycle design. Bring on the electric engines and the artificial intelligence. Swiss supergroup Gannet Design and Fuhrer Moto have teamed up to kick off the Honda CB1000R custom scene…

The 90s CBs are great for customisers. For a precious few years, we had bikes that retained the essence of those 70s and 80s classics while being (even more) reliable and now cheap as stale peanuts to buy. And now the older bikes are becoming rarer, it makes double the sense…

Living next to the ocean is gorgeous, but as any surf-girted motorcycle nut will tell you, all that salty sea breeze just destroys motorcycles. It eats chrome, dulls aluminum and causes rust to flash up in weeks. So what’s the point of a polished custom if it’s just going to get eaten by the sea?