Deus Ex Machina has a refreshingly heretical approach to cafe racer building, this bike is one of their latest creations and you can tell at a glance that it’s a signature, antipodean cafe belter.
The team at Deus have a long held love of the Yamaha SR500, it’s a single cylinder Japanese thumper designed in the late 70s, interestingly it was only the second 4-stroke engine design Yamaha had ever developed. They kept the engineering as simple as possible, there’s one valve in and one valve out with a single carburettor and a bullet-proof 5-speed transmission.
With this cafe creation, dubbed the Cherry Cafe, Deus stripped the original bike back to save weight, then painted the frame cherry-red. They added a custom seat, rear cowling and front cowling, then added Tingate clip-on handlebars, a CR round slide carburettor and stainless steel fenders on the front and back.
Cherry Cafe is currently for sale via Deus Ex Machina’s Australian website here, don’t expect it to be cheap but do expect it to be exceptionally good fun.
If you’d like to read more about the development of the Yamaha SR500, click here.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
