The term “motorised bicycle” is not generally associated with coolness. Until now that is. Meet the Phantom 1903, a hand-built motorised bike that you’d kill a Nun for.
Phantom Bikes started out as a group of friends building retro motorised bikes for fun, before they knew it people wanted to buy them, so they rented a warehouse in San Diego and never looked back.
The Phantom 1903 has a springer front end, a 50cc motor, super-wide aluminium rims and an aluminium adjustable quill stem. We don’t know what that last one is but it sounds suitably old fashioned. The bikes can be either motor or pedal powered and sell for $1,950 USD a piece (brand new).
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, 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 millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
It isn’t widely known that BSA/Triumph were experimenting with overhead cam engines back in the early 1970s as a way of trying to compete with the surge of high-performance, reliable, and non-leaking Japanese motorcycles pouring into the country. We do know that at least two OHC BSA/Triumph triple cylinder engines were built, they used the…
This is probably the most interesting street tracker we’ve ever featured. If you’re skeptical take a closer look at that front and rear suspension. The bike started out humbly with a 1200cc V-twin literally stolen from his wife’s Sportster and am old frame gifted to Kevin from a close friend. Thankfully his wife now has…
The Tote Gote is an American trail riding bike designed to be the toughest motorcycle in the world. It wasn’t designed to go fast, but it was designed to go anywhere. In the mid-1950s Ralph Bonham grew tired of returning from hunts in the Utah mountains absolutely exhausted. Successful hunts were worse in a way,…
Inventor Charles F. Taylor’s one wheeled vehicles are a fascinating automotive “what if?” that never saw the required development time or resources devoted to them to make them a viable production vehicle. The single most remarkable thing about the vehicle is that it doesn’t use onboard computers to manage the stability. It’s a purely mechanical…
This is the Aero – it took master craftsman Georgio Rimi four years to build using a series of hand tools and an English wheel to painstakingly shape flat aluminum alloy panels into a series of beautiful compound curves – creating a one-of-a-kind bespoke BMW R100 RS. Meet MotoRRetro Georgio is the co-founder, along with…
This Ariel Red Hunter project bike looks like it’s a restoration that was never quite finished, it appears as though the frame and fuel tank have been painted ready for assembly, and it looks relatively complete with the crankcase, crankshaft, barrel, head, dynamo, gearbox, frame, fuel tank, oil tank, and many other essential parts all…
