Austin’s Handbuilt Motorcycle Show has been turning heads since 2014, but this year the event might just have become the greatest custom show on earth.

The best bikes leave you slack-jawed in admiration – beauty of design and perfection of execution, with much of the talent bubbling up from decades of auto/moto knowhow that would otherwise be dying somewhere in America’s rust belt.

But it’s not just the show that makes Handbuilt so brilliant, it’s also everything that’s going on around it. The event is now a major part of one of the greatest weekends of the biking year, when all of motorcycling’s planets are briefly in alignment in the Texan capital.

The show’s creators – the nice people at Revival Cycles, Austin’s premier custom joint (Vol 65 No 19) – have always staged their gig on the same weekend as the Americas MotoGP round at the Circuit of the Americas, just outside Austin. And then this year, the final planet slipped into line: the AMA added a round of its national flat-track series at COTA. Even better, this year the Handbuilt organisers established an anarchic Super Hooligan dirt track event across the road from the show. So it was all going off at once: MotoGP, flat track, dirt track and some of the most go-ahead, beautiful creations you’ll see anywhere on the 21^st century custom scene. Plus, Austin is a great place – way more indie and arty than most American cities.

Like any good party, the whole event feels like it’s on the verge of turning into a riot – albeit a very friendly one – with the Feds sitting in their cop cars, blue lights always flashing and spinning, just adding to the atmosphere. The area around the show is closed to traffic, so you can spread out and mix with the hot, sweaty crowd gazing in wonder at all kinds of weird and wonderful creations, some inside the show, some just parked up here and there. And then you stumble across the road to watch the Super Hooligans do their stuff on a tiny dirt track.

One racer (we use the term very loosely) tumbled off his bike mid-race, snapping a collarbone. He was so angry with his motorcycle for treating him badly that he torched the thing right there in the middle of the track. The charred remains were quickly cleaned up and the racing continued.

On with the show…

Land-speed legend

The main men at Revival Cycles – that’s Alan Stulberg and Stefan Hertel – probably didn’t mean to steal their own show, but they damn well did with this stealth-black BMW, modelled on one of the factory’s land-speed-record breakers, ridden by the madly brave Ernst Henne before the Second World War.

Revival were asked to build the bike for a gallery owner, which caused revolt among the company’s workers who were repulsed by the idea of creating a static-exhibit motorcycle. So Stulberg built two bikes: one runner and one non-runner.

The engine will be supercharged, like the original. The frame is fabricated out of flat-cut steel, shrouded by alloy bodywork, the trailing-link front suspension has a progressive linkage and multi-adjustable single shock, and there’s plenty of leather: the seat, knee rests and a comfy chest rest.

There’s only one bad thing about the whole BMW/Henne story and it’s a very bad thing indeed: they were bankrolled by the Nazis to prove the supposed superiority of the Arian race. Henne came out of it best. Not only was he the fastest motorcyclist in the world at the end of the 1930s, he also got out of fighting for Hitler because he had been so badly knocked about in crashes. Instead he spent the war as a staff-car chauffeur.

revivalcycles.com

Sands stroker 

If you’re a stinkwheel fan, there was one standout motorcycle at Handbuilt: Roland Sands’ Two-stroke Attack, a 1976 RD400 engine in a 1997 TZ chassis.

Californian Sands is best known for pumping out shedloads of wild custom bikes, plus concept bikes and pimp-up RSD (Roland Sands Design) parts for manufacturers like Ducati, BMW, Yamaha, Harley and others.

But in his heart of hearts he’s a racer. Sands rode a TZ to the 1998 US 250 title, a crown previously worn by Eddie Lawson, John Kocinski and others.

“I had always wanted to jam a two-stroke street motor into one of my old racebikes, so finally I got to make it happen!” he said.

The bike is stuffed with trick racetrack kit, including Team Roberts triple clamps (Sands has done a lot of work with King Kenny) and an Ed Erlenbacher-tuned motor. The sixties-style seat and fairing were fabricated by RSD people Aaron Boss and Scotty Diminick. The Japanese words say “Two-Stroke Attack”.

rolandsands.com

Highbrow hog

Isn’t this the neatest Harley you ever did see? It should be, because the man who made this wonder beast is a Bachelor of Fine Arts who has spent most of his life making exclusive furniture, classical guitars and all kinds of other cool stuff.

Curtis Miller didn’t start making bikes until he had been on this earth for six decades and this is only his second café racer, christened the Grand Prix. He designed and made his own frame to curve around a 2009 Sportster engine, bought off eBay.

The rudimentary but faultlessly executed bodywork is redolent of the early aerodynamics used by land-speed-record breakers like Eric Fernihough during the 1930s.

Miller’s company Ardent Motorcycles is based in Milford, Michigan, and there’s no doubt we will be hearing more about him.

ardentmotorcycles.com

Righteous metal

You don’t get to see a lot of engraved crankcases at hipster custom shows, but it had to happen someday… This is Retro Moto’s café-pimped XS650, with its gearbox casing beautifully engraved with the legend “God is my strength and my power and he maketh my way perfect”. Very nice, but we’re not entirely sure that any god would consider an XS650 as the perfect way forward.

Main man at Retro Moto in Dallas, Texas, is Junior Burrell. Junior is your original craftsman, beating, hammering, machining this stock XS into a straight, no-messing café racer, with alloy seat and handlebar fairing.

retromoto1.com

Bobbed Beemer

This is Sofi Tsingos, owner of Dallas-based GT-Moto, who rescued this 1973 BMW R75/5 from a cruel, evil owner, deep in the heart of Oklahoma. The plan was to restore the bike to original.

“But it was so rough and barely running, with so many non-original parts that we decided to do something a bit different,” said Sofi, who grew up in her dad’s aircraft maintenance shop, surrounded by ancient bikes and cars.

Sofi turned the Bee Em into a bobber, doing all the design, welding, wiring and paint in house. For other stuff she enlisted custom talent from around her local area: the seat was hand-stitched by Boss Hogg Custom Motorcycle Seats in Dallas and the engine was done by Perry Bushong in Fort Worth.

The springer front end is a modified DNA assembly, the modified gas tank comes from an R60 and the laydown shocks come all the way from Hagon in Essex.

Each year Sofi builds one bike that is raffled to raise money for cancer research organisations.

gt-moto.com

Bike overboard

Terry Heydt of Speed Machine Motorcycles in Minneapolis is having a lot of fun recreating the board track racers that tore around wooden-planked racetracks across the USA in the early days of the 20^th century. The sport got huge, until dozens of fans were killed by bikes flying out of the motordromes (later nicknamed murderdromes) and into the crowds.

Heydt’s bikes don’t get much more perfect than this creation, powered by a 1935 flathead VL motor, with Triumph pre-unit gearbox, 21-inch rims from a Kawasaki dirtbike and drum brakes from a Honda CM200. The frame, fork and handlebars are Heydt’s own. Cost of the build was around A$22,500.

Speed Machine also showed a similarly neat board tracker powered by a Honda XL350 single, for the more financially challenged.

www.facebook.com/speedmachinemc

Custom to order

It had to happen: a small American start-up undertaking full production of hipster motorcycles. The Janus Phoenix 250 is made in Goshen, Indiana, by architect Richard Worsham and custom-builder Devin Biek. Janus started out making high-end custom mopeds (!) before moving onto bigger things, like the Phoenix 250.

“We are not industry insiders; we are a small company handcrafting small bikes,” said Worsham. “With my background in architecture and Devin’s in custom building and mechanics, we produce a product that channels function and beauty in equal parts.”

Dig the funky front end and four-stroke single motor, a Chinese Honda copy. Prices start at A$9780, in the US.

janusmotorcycles.com

Postie with the mostie

Say hello to Steve Garn, who any moment now will be taking this little monster on a land-speed-record run in Ohio. Garn is the man behind Brew Bikes (Brew for ‘Blue Ridge Electric & Welding’) based in North Carolina. He’s a former motocrosser who started building racing bicycles in the 1970s to finance his racing.

This bike is a much-modded 1965 Honda Super Cub, with fuel tank built into the frame and faired-in forks. The underseat fuel cap is modelled on a 45rpm vinyl record adaptor: it’s the little details that count.

“We’re gonna land-speed race it this year at Ohio,” said Garn. “The engine is punched out to 88cc so we race it in the 100cc class – see if we can get more than 72 miles an hour out of it. The engine is real strong and it’s got a four-speed ’box with a hand clutch.”

brewracingframes.com

WORDS MAT OXLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BRANDON LAJOIE