Missourian Jim Schmig was on hand for one of the most important developments in motorcycling history. “I was cruising down St. Charles Rock Road around St. Louis one day in 1977, and I saw the most unusual Harley frame,” Schmig said. “I stopped at a bike shop, it was called Osborne’s. I asked the cat [...]
Electric motorcycle manufacturer, Brammo Inc., wants to know how much abuse their forward-looking electric machines can take. So what are they doing to find out? Looking for police departments to beat the living snot out of them. In the past, the standard choice of a motorcycle for American police departments was a large, heavy machine. [...]
There aren’t too many mad dogs left in the world like Slim of Slimsfab. Slim goes his own way when it comes to building a motorcycle, and the way he goes is righteous in the extreme. Not one to get stuck in a rut building Harley-only customs, Slim will take on whatever bike suits his [...]
Charlie Stockwell designs and builds custom Harley-Davidson motorcycles for Warr’s Harley-Davidson in London, England. Stockwell has been behind the cool bikes coming out of Warr’s since 1996. My aim was and and still is to bring together and celebrate the creative culture and lifestyle in hand built custom motorcycles. Japanese clothing maker Evisu commissioned Stockwell [...]
The new Horex VR6 Roadster is a very large machine. Like the Triumph Rocket III before it, the bike aspires to take a place in the line of large, highway-ready machines which essentially began with the creation of the Honda Goldwing. And like the Goldwing, this bike, though considerably less plebeian, is expected to actually [...]
Victory, a division of Polaris, has been on an upswing. Their latest push to move machines in the motorcycle segment, the Victory Boardwalk, is more of the same from the Medina, Minnesota builder. According to the flaks, the Boardwalk came about when: We took the style and attitude of every laid-back rider who loves a [...]
While it may not be, technically, a motorcycle, the M-1 ebike from Marrs Cycles looks old school and packs newfangled technology which might just make it a cool as a motorcycle. The company which makes this thing, founded by Kacy Marrs and his business partner, Brad Fanshaw, has a lineage traceable through the custom motorcycle [...]
The Chevy Corvair (and I know because my dad had one back in the day that I used to take for surreptitious midnight runs) was not a great car. It handled like a rowboat, was seriously underpowered for its weight and most of the model years were sort of unattractive. The Corvair suffered under the [...]
Is it the end for chrome-bedecked and impossibly expensive ‘choppers?’ As you read this, riders and builders taking on the task of killing the genre – and they’re doing it themselves. They’re taking, as they always have, classic bikes and reconfiguring them to meet their needs and their vision of what a motorcycle should be, [...]
A one-of-a-kind motorcycle owned by famed racer Mike Avila can now be yours for the tidy sum of $95K. The bagger deluxe is on display at Arlen Ness’s custom shop in Dublin, Calif., and one Arlen Ness sales jockey calls it “rolling art at its finest.” Hand-built and featuring hand-shaped metal construction and no visible welds, [...]
