In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a war that was brewing right here on our shores. It wasn't geopolitical, no. It was a war for horsepower and the Japanese motorcycle manufacturers of the day were duking it out for ultimate power supremacy.
We recently did a little bike run through Indiana out to a rural property with a group of fun loving riders from all different states and Matthew Nebel came down from Cleveland with a great group to get away for a bit. We noticed right away he wasnt riding your average XS650 and after a few pits stops and close inspection we realized that he had something pretty unique that needed some light shed on it so more people could come to dig this ever evolving patina proud Yamaha chopper. We shot some photos and talked with him a bit about why he chose this for his daily rider.
Michael prides himself on his budget builds. One of the ways he’s able to keep costs down is by capitalizing on his talent for utilizing found items in his his builds. For example, that’s a mini Heineken keg under the seat that houses the battery and electronics.
We recently did a feature on the crew behind central Indiana's vintage restoration shop Hoy Vintage Cycles and their lead tech Kim Wroblewski was nice enough to fire up his Yamaha XS650 rephased big bore street legal flat tracker and we couldn't wait to hear a little more about it. When you see this bike in person it's one of those things where it certainly looks fast sitting still and looks even faster going down the road but we wanted to know all the details of what makes it such a trip to ride so we sat down with Kim in the shop and got a little backstory on this really cool piece that was the combined effort between him and one of Vance and Hines top flat track specialists.
This summer we took a trip to Michigan to participate in the Zylstra choppers Apocalypse Run up to the upper peninsula, (a feature we will be running next month) and we had the chance to connect with some really inspiring and interesting builders along the way who also made the trek for the run on their custom bikes. One stand out bike that refused to go unnoticed at every stop was this 1973 XS650 built by Nick Moyer of Chicago. With every single element of this bike custom made and fabricated from other found parts this bike was unlike any XS650 we had ever seen. Not to mention it's hard not to love a chrome frame and nods to builders like Indian Larry with his wild twisted downtubes. Basically every chance that Nick had to change up an element of the bike to make it completely innovative and original to him he went with it. Repurposing old hot rod car parts and custom fabricating other parts the bike really stands out on it's own. We waited for the dreaded upper peninsula Michigan rains to subside on day 2 of the run and sat down with Nick to discuss some of our favorite parts of the build.
