Month: August 2011

RIP Gary Nixon.

A motorcycle racing legend. He was a cantankerous man with a nose for the checkered flag.

A very good write-up on him can be found HERE

Here he is in Daytona 2004 going at it (as he often did) with Jay Springstien (another famous #9 racer). I was there that year for this race. Saw him ride the hell out of that track many times.

Video of Mad Skills at the Police Rodeo.

Very impressive! I guess when you ride for a living 10 hours a day you get pretty good at the low speed stuff.

Close-ups of the outrageous Allen Millyard custom V8 Kawasaki KZ.

I’ll be going back and highlighting a few bikes here and there from the Barbers Gallery. This is one of them. I’ve been aware of this bike and done posts on it for along time now. Like most folks I was amazed at the concept and the workmanship required to build it. But I was really amazed when I finally got to see it up close and in person. It’s practically at a “factory finished” level of quality. Check out the close-ups. Really impressive work. And god I’d LOVE to ride it!


A Stunning Cafe (or Kaffee) Moto Guzzi!

I´d be very happy if you´d post my latest project on your famous site.

This custom cafe racer was built for an english customer- John Purser (JP).
The donor bike was his old T3 California. The wasted fat lady was reborn as a skinny supermodel (180kg dryweight)- only the frame lost 3kg of needless metal.
The engine was modified to LM 850 specs, ALL components on the bike are handcrafted. I even modified the few aftermarket parts, to match the optics.
Shocks are Ikon, fork is of a Le Mans 3 with new tubes and FAC dampers. I built a minimal electrical system including a motogadget instrument, electronic ignition and dyna coils.

“Kaffeemaschine” (coffee machine) is my company, building unique cafe racers and bespoke bikes, based on the classic Guzzi V2-engine and frame.
I´d be very glad if you would mention and link my webside “www.kaffee-maschine.net“.

If you have any more questions or need more info, don´t hesitate to contact me.

Best regards from Hamburg/Germany,
Axel Budde

Congratulations on a beautiful build and thank you for the photos!

Reader submittal. A nice slideshow from the UK.

I’m a newbie to the blog but I’m enjoying it very much. These pictures were taken at local meetings here in Norfolk UK on two successive years. I hope they’re of interest, I’m afraid I’m not much of a photographer.

Kenneth Pantling

Nice shots Kenneth! Thanks Much! I like the Scott Flying Squirrel! Well ahead of it’s time!

Wow! Quite a traffic boost yesterday!

It looks like the folks really enjoyed the Barber slideshow! That’s quite a traffic spike!  This combined with the hits on Twitter and Facebook put us in the 10K range.   Thanks to everybody for stopping by!  As a comparison we had well over 80,000 visitors last month.  A record.

Here’s a really big slideshow of all my Barber pics.

This is all the useable shots I have. I’ll probably comeback and re-post individual shots to spotlight certain individual bikes that merrit attention. Sorry about the quality on some of them . It’s not well lit for photography… which I’m sure is partly intentional. I probably had to exclude another 50 or so photos because my camera wasn’t fast enough and had a hard time adjusting to the conditions even with the flash. I’ll be better equipped next time. As a side not the museum assistants were a really knowledgeable group and as I was there on a slow day we had some really interesting chats.