David Morales' Honda 50 Magnum - Man-Sized Mini

Image Courtesy Peter Salisbury

While I’ve contributed to Pipeburn in the past (showcasing Julian Farnam’s fantastic Dirtbag Challenge budget-build CHOPPRD) my personal specialty is profiling unusual and rare production bikes. For a motorcycle to meet my criteria and be featured in one of my articles it must be weird, cool, and most importantly something exceptional that few have bothered to cover in any great detail. So while I enjoy a good custom as much as the next red-blooded motorcycle fanatic, I don’t often come across builds that really tick all the boxes to earn the Official OddBike Seal of Approval.

So when I got an unsolicited email from a kind fellow by the name of David Morales with pictures of a modified-beyond-recognition Honda Z50A monkeybike, I knew I had found my next contribution to Pipeburn and a custom machine that would be worthy of the OddBike designation. Behold – the 50 Magnum.

Read the rest on Pipeburn.com

Wakan / Avinton - Franco-American Hybrid

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There is a certain brutish elegance to the act of cramming an impossibly huge engine into a tiny chassis. American designers in particular seem to have an affinity for stuffing air-cooled big twins of the Harley Davidson variety into sporting machines. There is something appealing about the incongruence of seeing a shuddering, massively torquey engine with its acres of gleaming billet and chrome overwhelming the appearance of an otherwise lithe machine. While not common, you do have a few choices if you desire a Big McLargehuge motor in a bike with sporting pretensions. Buell and Ecosse catered to the (admittedly limited) air-cooled-Harley-style-45-degree-twin-in-a-sport-slash-muscle-bike market, while Roehr tried to build a supercharged superbike around a V-Rod engine. If you desired something more inspired that wasn’t a cookie-cutter custom or generic café-styled machine, there was always Confederate. The only notable entrant from overseas was Yamaha, who got into the game with their weird but remarkably tame Warrior-powered MT-01.

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So it only makes sense that a French company would champion the cause of big American cruiser power in a sporty machine while citing Carroll Shelby as a major influence. That would be the plot synopsis of Wakan/Avinton, the oddball muscle-sport-bike that has been produced off-and-on in France since the mid-2000s.

Julian Farnam's CHOPPRD - The leading-link Dirtbag RD400

Image Courtesy Alan Lapp

In a modest garage a few miles east of San Francisco, there is a man who builds motorcycles. This might not sound particularly exceptional, as there are men building bikes in many garages in many cities, and some of them are exceptional enough to get profiled on sites like this. Julian Farnam is a different sort of builder though, and he has built a different sort of bike. He is a consummate tinkerer, a man who puts together unique machines of his own design in his spare time. It's not his day job, but he is damn good at what he does – producing some of the most interesting and thoughtfully designed custom bikes you'll come across anywhere. The bike we are featuring today is one of Julian's odd creations, a raked and chopped Yamaha RD400 that applies one of Julian's favourite concepts – alternative front suspensions. More remarkable is that the CHOPPRD, as Julian has christened it, was built in his spare time over a 30 day period for a total budget that could not exceed $1000 – that includes the donor bike and all the parts and modifications that go with it.

Read the rest about Julian Farnam's CHOPPRD RD400 on Pipeburn