I love electric motorcycles, they don’t make the same thundering roar as more traditional gasoline powered bikes but they do offer extraordinary torque, low maintenance and an interesting engine noise not entirely unlike Luke Skywalkers Land Speeder.
The 1938 Indian Chief incorporated a number of improvements over the 1937 model, the engineers at Indian worked on refining each model year as best they could and so the 1938 Chief had dozens of these small improvements.
The Super 32 Rovescio, built by tiny Roman manufacturer Nembo Motociclette, is just such an iconoclastic machine. It is a motorcycle that literally turns engine design on its head – because designer Daniele Sabatini decided he could build a better motor by flipping it upside down.
The Yamaha XS360 is an interesting motorcycle, the model never saw a huge production run and were, in many respects, the slightly smaller brother of the much more famous Yamaha XS400.
Michael Mundy, the proprietor of Steel Bent Customs, has a penchant for building some of the cleanest cafe racer motorcycles you’ll find anywhere. He tends to favour the Honda CB750 and has now got the process of turning the bike from a lumbering over-weight bike into an exceedingly clean, pure example of what a cafe racer can be if the builder sticks to the core of what the genre originally entailed.
This bike is a Harley-Davidson Sportster custom by Art of Racer, it’s based on a 1991 Sportster though the only parts of the original bike are the engine, transmission and carburettor. That rather unique looking frame, modified springer front-end, suicide clutch, saddle, handlebars, rear fender and fuel tank are all custom creations.
The humble Honda CB250N isn’t the sort of motorbike you’d usually see being customised, especially not to this degree. That said, the team at Ellaspede have been making quite a name for themselves working with slightly unusual motorcycles. In fact, they’re currently giving one of them away here.
The Norton Model 50 was originally put into production in 1933, the bike was designed by Edgar Franks – the talented if not a little…
he Harley-Davidson Nightster has been a runaway success for Harley-Davidson since it was released in 2007, the bike offered people a custom look for under $9,000 USD and it was fitted with Harley’s famous 1200cc Sportster v-twin engine.
For those of you who didn’t know, a “Silodrome” is actually a Wall of Death, a huge silo shaped chamber in which stuntmen (and women) ride around the walls at speeds high enough to create G-forces higher than gravity. This allows them to ride at a 90 degree angle to the ground whilst generally goofing around almost never dying.
The R131 Fighter by Confederate Motorcycles is a bike I’ve been wanting to feature here on Silodrome for quite some time, in some respects it’s the epitome of an engineering first approach to motorcycle design, and that’s resulted in a bike that’s beautiful purely because form follows function.
The Indian 101 Scout was produced between 1928 and 1931, it was the successor to the previous Scout model that began production in 1920 but the 101 had been fully reworked from the ground up by Charles Franklin, the senior Indian engineer and former motorcycle racer responsible for the original Scout.
