Cafe Racer TV approached both Lossa Engineering and Garage Company before filming season 2 and asked the well-known custom bike builders to collaborate on the construction of a unique cafe racer, both teams jumped at the chance with the guys at Lossa providing a Yamaha RD400 frame and the team at Garage Company provided a Yamaha RD350 engine.
The bike was then built in 2 distinct stages with the Lossa Engineering crew taking care of detabbing and bracing the frame, rewiring the loom and relocating the battery, supplying and stretching a Daytona style gas tank, taking an SR500 gas tank and modifying it into the rear cowling, supplying an aluminum swing arm and racing shocks.
The Garage Company crew rebuilt the RD350 motor using all new parts, they hand built the exhaust from sheet metal, added Mikuni carburettors, a custom Yamaha front end and added controls, race tires and rear sets.
The completed bike is unmistakably a Yamaha, the fuel tank and rear cowling work incredibly well together and the overall sense of minimalism and light-weight is pervasive throughout the design.
The bike is currently for sale here via Lossa Engineering, on the off chance that you have a pile of Benjamins lying around in need of a new home.
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.
