Category: British Customs

From Storage Bike to Record Setter: An Interview with Carl Bjorklund of Super Rat

Post author By British Customs
Post date February 29, 2016

British Customs

Carl Bjorklund of Super Rat doing some work on a custom motorcycle

Carl Bjorklund is the co-founder of the custom motorcycle garage Super Rat, where he builds unique custom motorcycles and land speed record bikes that he races on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The documentary Out of Nothing is about the bikes he has built to pursue his passion for speed on the Salt Flats. He was invited by Thor Drake of See See Motorcycles to put his latest custom motorcycle on display at the 2016 One Moto Show in Portland, OR.

British Customs: How did Super Rat get started?

Carl Bjorklund: My brother and I became motorheads in the 70s when we started getting into hot rods. All through high school we were huge air-cooled VW fanatics, and at one point we had more than twenty VWs we were hot rodding. We were both in wood shop and auto shop, and loved working with our hands. Our parents strictly forbade us from riding motorcycles, but my brother bought a Harley anyway and convinced me to get one too. We started out as Harley and Triumph guys out of high school, and got into wrenching on bikes. We always wanted to run a shop, and always did a nice job fabricating things, and when a friend of ours saw a bike we made he said, “That’s not a rat, that’s a super rat!” So that’s what we started calling the shop from then on. Since then, we’ve grown from making custom street motorcycles to building bikes to chase world land speed records on at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

BC: What does it mean to you to be able to do things by hand?

CB: I like challenging myself. I like to see if I can take a bike out of storage and make something polished out of it. Built instead of bought. The ultimate goal is to see if I can set a world record at the Bonneville Salt Flats with a bike I pulled out of storage. I’m working on such a build right now actually.

British Customs

Carl Bjorklund of Super Rat at the Bonneville Salt Flats on his land speed bike

BC: How did you get into land speed racing and building land speed bikes?

CB: I’ve always been a horsepower fiend and loved building turbos, and Bonneville has always been this sacred place to us as gearheads. Seeing all these big names and race cars competing there made us believe that it wasn’t accessible until we saw a land speed bike at a show once and got to talk to its owner. He ended up inviting us out to Bonneville, and after we went to watch once we were addicted. There isn’t any promotional anything at the Salt, just people who are dedicated and committed to racing. It’s a tough place to go to, and just to get to. The landscape is brutal. But it’s 100% racing there.

BC: Do you have any preferences about what kind of platform you like to use when you’re building a bike?

CB: I’m really into Ducatis for their horsepower. I tried to hit 200 mph on a cafe racer built with a Ducati Desmosedici engine once, but it gave me some trouble when I got it up to 170. I like singles and V-twins for their torque too. But I have a passion for antique motorcycles, and have been working back by the decades. I’ve been working on bikes that were made in the 60s, and am looking forward to working on bikes from the 50s, and then the 40s, and so on.

Carl Bjorklund of Super Rat at Bonneville

British Customs

Carl Bjorklund of Super Rat racing at the bonneville Salt Flats

BC: Where do you think the custom motorcycle scene is going?

CB: I think that many of the common genres of bikes like speedway bikes, speed bikes, street trackers, and cafe racers are getting tired. I think builds are going to get more and more complex because there are so many talented builders out there and it’s getting harder to set yourself apart.

BC: What kind of bike are you bringing with you to this year’s One Moto Show?

CB: It’s a Harley Shovelhead crossed between a few genres. It’s pretty unique, and I’m pretty excited about it.

For more awesome interviews and great info from British Customs, visit their website British-Customs.com

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Taking My Own Approach: Interview with Ian Halcott of Twinline Motorcycles

Post author By British Customs
Post date February 26, 2016

British Customs

Ian Halcott of Twinline Motorcycles

Ian Halcott is the founder of Twinline Motorcycles, based out of Seattle, WA. His unique custom builds have been featured in shows such as The Handbuilt Motorcycle Show and in various media outlets across the internet. He was invited by Thor Drake of See See Motorcycles to put his latest custom motorcycle on display at the 2016 One Moto Show in Portland, OR.

British Customs: How did Twinline Motorcycles get started?

Ian Halcott: I had been working on my granddad’s ’67 Honda CL160, trying to get it back on the road. I was riding a sportbike as my daily commuter, but had been going back to the old bikes and riding them more and more. I liked the way they look, and wanted to get them back on the road. There weren’t any shops around to take old bikes to, and I had always wanted to do custom work, so I used it as a chance to do something new. I found that I like exploring different styles and types. A lot of my inspiration comes from bikes made in the 60s; I think that era produced the most beautiful motorcycles. But I still like modern bikes, and want to get more into working with that world. I like to think about where I’m going instead of where I’ve been. I want to have my own approach to building a custom motorcycle.

British Customs

Custom bike by Twinline Motorcycles

BC: What inspired you to learn how to start working with your hands?

IH: I can’t just sit on my butt and stare at a computer all day long and feel like I’m being productive. I have to make things that are three dimensional and real. There are other jobs that definitely pay better, but I’m not interested in pursuing them. You know you’ve made it in motorcycles when you can’t get out of it; I’m not going to be able to get out of doing this process.

British Customs

Kawasaki Ninja 600 engine in a Honda CB500 frame

BC: Where did you learn all the skills necessary to build a custom motorcycle?

IH: I learned everything over a number of years from a number of people. I used to hang out in a lot of old timer’s shops where they had a lot of racers and flat track bikes, where I met many of my mentors. I listened to anything anyone had to tell me, because it was as much a community effort as it was anything else. The process of learning mechanical work to welding to everything else was all trial and error, and I just had to tackle everything and learn it the best that I could. If you work at it, you can eventually get to the point where you can literally build everything.

British Customs

Kawasaki Ninja 600 engine in a Honda CB500 frame

BC: What are your thoughts on where the custom motorcycle scene is going?

IH: I can’t really say. The community of builders has gotten really strong. It definitely wasn’t what it is now when I opened my garage. So many people are contributing to it now, and it seems like a new shop opens every five minutes. Of those shops, some will make great strides, and others won’t make it, but the community will still keep moving forward.

British Customs

Custom bike by Twinline Motorcycles

BC: A number of your builds have been cafe racers. Why is that?

IH: Honestly, I really suck at racing, but it’s what inspires me. I love things that are so streamlined and minimalist — racing bikes don’t have anything more than they need, and I’ll take any advantage I can get on a motorcycle. It’s the closest thing to aviation.

British Customs

Goldie by Twinline Motorcycles

BC: You’ve built a number of bikes that are very different from most custom motorcycle builders, with regards to some of your builds using modern sportbike platforms. Do you have any preferences as to what kind of system you like to work with?

IH: Not really, actually. Every motorcycle has its own specific design for what its set up to do, and I respect that. There are things I like aesthetically about air-cooled bikes, and there are reliability advantages that I like about liquid-cooled bikes. But there is something about having a relatively maintenance-free motorcycle with a lot of horsepower like today’s bikes. You don’t have get same power-to-weight ratio anywhere else. In the end, I don’t really care about the configuration: if it has wheels and a motor I’m on it. It’s all about how you utilize the platform you’re on.

British Customs

Custom Honda CB750 from Twinline Motorcycles

BC: What are you going to bring with you to The One Moto Show?

IH: I’m building an ’04 Yamaha R6 I’m calling The Legionnaire (#thelegionnairemoto). It’s my own creation, and I wouldn’t call it a street fighter or a cafe racer. It’s my vision of a modern bike with some 80s sportbike mixed with 60s TT styling. It’s a bastard, to say the least. I’m leaving everything on it raw, and I built the subframe, seat, tail section, and full aluminum fairings. Next year though, I plan to bring my granddad’s bike to The One Moto Show, since it’ll be the 50th anniversary of when he bought the bike.

For more interviews with builders from the One Moto Show, visit British-Customs.com

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Giving Old Bikes a Second Chance

Post author By British Customs
Post date February 25, 2016

British Customs

Craig Marleau of Kick Start Garage

Craig Marleau is the founder of Kick Start Garage, a custom vintage motorcycle shop based in Northern California. He specializes in building cafe racers, and was invited by Thor Drake of See See Motorcycles to put his latest custom motorcycle on display at the 2016 One Moto Show in Portland, OR.

British Customs: How did Kick Start Garage get started?

Craig Marleau: Having my own garage and making custom motorcycles has always been in the back of my head. My background is in auto restoration: I worked in a high end restoration shop working on performance cars like Aston Martins, Ferraris, and Duesenbergs and building them to show on the grass at Pebble Beach Concourse D’Elegance for 17 years. But I was always into riding street bikes and racing motorcycles. When I was a youngster, I was getting really close to losing my license, so I sold my street bike and bought a dirt bike. I enjoyed dirt riding for a while, but I really wanted to get back out on the street. So I bought an old BMW clunker to make it hard for myself to get in trouble. I spent my evenings working on the bike with my wife after I got home from my day job. Once we got the bike looking pretty good, we entered it into shows and it started winning awards. Then the economy crashed, and we moved out to Texas where I got a job in bike retail at a dealership. That’s when I started going to track days and road racing, and I really got into cafe racers and vintage bikes in particular. From then on I converted every bike I bought into a cafe racer. We moved back to California after we had kids, where we built a house and I got another job working for a dealership. When the economy tanked again. I didn’t have a job and I needed to reinvent myself, so I decided to finally open a shop working on old bikes, which is where the name Kick Start came from: all the bikes I was working on were kickstarters. The garage grew from there. I heard about The One Show, and we decided we wanted to check it out, so we loaded up the truck with one of our bikes and drove up to Portland. When we got there, we couldn’t find a parking spot, so we asked some guy walking around among all the other guys there if he knew where there was any parking, and he helped us out. We told him we brought a bike with us and asked if he knew if we could show it, and he said we sure could: it turned out the guy was Thor Drake himself. He gave us a spot to show our bike, and we’ve been going to The One Show ever since.

British Customs

Custom BMW R90/6 from Kick Start Garage

BC: What kind of bikes do you enjoy working on the most?

CM: I love working on Triumphs, actually. Especially air-cooled carbureted ones: they have clean looks and easy lines, and I don’t have to try to figure out how to hide any of the electronics. I like minimalism in my builds, so I like minimalist designs; I don’t even like batteries. I respect the simplicity of carburetors, and the old world ways of doing things. I think a lot of that is getting lost. Especially the craftsmanship of tuning, because you don’t learn anything by downloading a fuel map to your ECU — there isn’t anything hand built or custom about that. With a carburetor though, you can get in there and tune your engine by hand. That’s an art.

British Customs

Custom CB750 from Kick Start Garage

BC: How did you get started doing everything by hand?

CM: Out of necessity. At the time, I didn’t have the money to buy parts, so I figured out how to make them for myself. There were no machine shops in the area where I could hire a guy to make them for me, either. So through trial and error, I figured out how to do what I wanted to do. Once you figure out how to make things and do things by hand, it becomes a mentality. You blow the door down and just start making everything you need instead of flipping through a catalog and picking the parts that are closest to what you have in mind. That’s why we don’t have any limitations.

British Customs

Custom Honda CL350 from Kick Start Garage

BC: What is it about cafe racers that made you want to start building them?

CM: I fell in love with that whole era of motorcycling. The Italian bikes that came off the production line that were stylized like cafe racers are what first caught my eye, and then I just kept looking back at the bikes from the 60s: the Ace Cafe bikes, the Triumphs, Nortons, Tritons, all of them. I was struck by the style and design of cafe racers — the drop bars, the race-looking lines, the rearsets, the hump seat. The Velocette Thruxton was the first bike I looked at and immediately knew it was a race bike.

British Customs

Some of the custom bikes from Kick Start Garage loaded up in the trailer

BC: Why do you stick with making and working on vintage bikes?

CM: It might sound sentimental, but it’s because I want to give them a second chance. When you find them, they’re either beat down or forgotten, and nobody thinks it’s cool because it’s just an old bike. But it’s pretty darn neat when you roll up on a bike that you built and everyone wants to know all about it. Vintage bikes aren’t cookie cutter bikes: they’re unique, and you can be proud of them.

British Customs

Custom vintage Ducati from Kick Start Garage

BC: Where do you see the custom motorcycle scene going?

CM: The custom motorcycle scene is taking a shape, but it’s coming down to the same old thing about motorcycles: motorcycles are like shoes, and you have one for every mood. The trend is moving towards the old school 70s choppers, but where we want it to go and what we think is cool is the vintage motocross scene. In that vein we think the growing scene around scramblers is going to evolve and take people towards vintage motocross.

BC: What are you building for The One Moto Show?

CM: It’s going to be pretty different. We’re cross-blending brands and genres. It’s a ’71 BMW R750R with a sidecar pulling a custom ’73 Bultaco Pursang. We’re highlighting the suspension on the Bultaco with a crazy paint job and a custom seat. I almost feel like it’s too pretty to throw a leg over it, even though it’s meant to be a functional race bike. We’re thinking of calling it the Taco Truck.

For more interviews from builders at the One Moto Show, or to see their wicked bikes, check out British-Customs.com

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Escape Artist: Interview with Hill Hudson of the Escape Collective

Post author By British Customs
Post date February 24, 2016

British Customs

Hill Hudson of the Escape Collective working on his CB350 build

Hill Hudson is a herald of the New Heritage lifestyle. Hudson is a custom vintage motorcycle builder based out of Portland, OR, who works with the same tools his Brooklynite grandfather used in his machine shop established in 1886. Hudson is also a co-founder of the Escape Collective, an innovative group of builders and artists devoted to the adventure lifestyle by promoting motorcycle camping. He was invited by Thor Drake of See See Motorcycles to put his latest custom motorcycle on display at the 2016 One Moto Show in Portland, OR. – See more at: http://www.british-customs.com/triumph-motorcycle-blog/the-escape-artist-an-interview-with-hill-hudson-of-the-escape-collective/#sthash.w9kVZpo6.dpuf

British Customs: When did you first start riding?

Hill Hudson: I first started riding when I was 19 (I’m 26 now). My older brother was going to college in Rhode Island, and he came back one break on a 1965 CB160, which was entirely unexpected, and I just went, “Oh shit, that’s cool,” when I saw him pull up on it. I started looking around and I found out that the CB160 had a big brother called the CB77, nicknamed the Toaster Tank, and I picked one up. At the time I was interning for a woodworker who had bikes, and when he found out that I had just bought my first motorcycle and that it was a vintage fixer-upper, my woodworking internship immediately turned into a bike restoration internship. I spent the whole summer with that old craftsman learning how to rebuild engines, paint, and wrench. I think I became the son he never had.

British Customs

Hill Hudson mocking up the hand machined headlight for this CB350 build

BC: You make a number of things with your hands — it seems like building custom motorcycles is just one part of your creative outlet, and doesn’t wholly encompass what you do. What prompted you to get into design and fabrication?

HH: It was weird. My grandfather owned and operated a factory in Brooklyn that was established in 1886 where he made paper doilies for his company, Brooklace Paper Co. In the factory itself, he had a machine shop where he built all the tools needed to stamp the doilies. After he passed away, my brother brought all his old machinery back home. I was attending art school and getting my BA in Fine Art, and while I was working on my thesis I realized I was over illustration and wanted to get into making things by hand. I wanted to create things instead of just draw them. I moved in with my brother, and befriended James Crowe of We are West America, who taught me how to weld and machine. As I was learning these skills, I felt like I was doing what I needed to be doing: I wanted to carry on my grandfather’s legacy. My grandfather is my inspiration for building things by hand because he had this “you can build anything if you have the will to” mentality, which I began to understand once I was able to machine the parts I wanted to install on my bike. For my thesis, I decided I wanted to build a motorcycle because it encapsulated everything I learned in art school: sculpture, graphic design, illustration, and so on. My mentors pushed me hard to dive into the question of why I wanted to build a motorcycle though, and I realized it was for more reasons than they look nice: it was a way for me to escape into my work. By building a motorcycle, I was able to escape my thoughts and anxiety, work through my issues, and physically and emotionally channel myself into what I was doing. So I named the motorcycle the Escape Machine.

British Customs

The Escape Machine by Hill Hudson

“It’s so interesting that motorcycles bleed into every little thing in your life.”

BC: What is the Escape Collective?

HH: The Escape Collective was named after the Escape Machine. I had a group of friends that formed during and after college, and one year we decided that we all wanted to go to Sasquatch Music Festival. We were all engineers, art students, and builders of different kinds, and we decided to build a geodesic dome to camp in for the trip. The domes got noticed online, and started gaining traction. Afterwards, we were hired by a company to build 14 domes, and that got us started as a company. Now, we build whatever people want us to: we do experiential buildouts for events and festivals, domes for Dream Roll, a whole range of things. The Escape Collective is taking over my shop, and our goal is to advance and release a solid product line that unites motorcycles and camping.

Geodesic dome from the Escape Collective

British Customs

One of the Escape Collective’s geodesic domes

BC: What about vintage things draws you to them?

HH: Nostalgia, mostly. And the simplicity in design. I’m personally addicted to salvage and vintage because there’s a beautiful power in vintage things; they’ve been in the hands of so many people. The first motorcycle I owned was the same model that my dad owned. All my tools were my grandfather’s, and I feel connected to him by using the same tools he held.

British Customs

Hudson’s Grandfather

“There’s a beautiful power in vintage things; they’ve been in the hands of so many people.”

BC: Tell us about the build you’re preparing for The One Moto Show.

HH: The build is a bike I’m making for a client. It’s a fully custom ’73 CB350. I wanted to make a custom motorcycle that could actually be ridden, even though it was heavily modified, so I had to learn a whole new set of skills for this bike. I completely nerded out over it: I machined the headlights from scratch on the lathe, made the whole subframe, made fork tubes from stainless steel, refabbed the tank, extended the swingarm, and mirrored the angle of the forks and the angle of the shocks so that they would make a perfect triangle. I challenged myself with this build, and am pretty happy with how it turned out. It inspired me to do something even better for the next one though because it completely changed the way I think about approaching builds: it’s so easy to limit yourself when you try to model parts off of things you like instead of just making it for yourself the way you want it.

British Customs

Hudson’s 1973 Honda CB350 built for the One Moto Show left front view

British Customs

Hudson’s 1973 Honda CB350 built for the One Moto Show right side rear

British Customs

Hudson’s 1973 Honda CB350 built for the One Moto Show left side profile

British Customs

Hudson’s 1973 Honda CB350 built for the One Moto Show rear subframe detail

British Customs

Hudson’s 1973 Honda CB350 built for the One Moto Show exhaust and rear detail

For more interviews with builders from the One Moto Show, stay tuned to Moto Cruiser or visit British-Customs.com

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Icon 1000 x British Customs: Salt of the Earth

Post author By Morgan Gales
Post date April 7, 2015

Salt of the Earth combines the British Custom’s Triumph Scrambler, team rider Ernie Vigil, and the endless expanses of the Salton Sea to mob until the wheels fell off.