Blitz Motorcycles is a French custom motorcycle garage that has the fascinating ability to completely polarise the people who see their bikes into two distinct camps.
On the right you have the people who think that the bikes don’t look shiny enough, don’t have enough chrome and don’t look much like the always-polished-rarely-ridden bikes we see elsewhere in the world of custom motorcycles.
The over on the left you have people like me – who love the raw, rough and ready look of the bikes and the fact that they’re built to be ridden hard, scratched, dropped, raced and otherwise used as a means of cheap, non-glossy, urban transportation.
The bike you see here started life as a stock Kawasaki W650, it was fully disassembled so the frame could be powder-coated in army green, then the engine covers, fenders, wheels, handlebars, headlight and forks were powder-coated in black. The 650cc parallel twin then had a new set of K&N air filter pods bolted on and the Keihin CV34 carburettors were re-jetted to match.
An unmistakeable pair of Firestone Deluxe tires were added front and back, a move that’ll be wildly infuriating to the kinds of people who’s opinions don’t matter, and the electrical wiring was all simplified before being reattached.
The fuel tank was pulled from an old Honda CB in salvage yard and then bolted on in its original condition, this is a bit of a trademark now for the boys at Blitz and it gives their builds a gritty feel that’s been winning them a lot of fans.
Blitz recently had a call from the official BMW Museum’s curator who asked if the museum could feature a recent BMW custom bike they’d built – the bike is now featured in the main lobby of the museum alongside a state-of-the-art concept car as a way of greeting visitors.
If you’d like to see more from Blitz Motorcycles you can click here to visit their selection of previous builds or click here to see the men behind the garage.
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.
