KINGSTON CUSTOMS CXL500

CX500 customs are popping up all over the place at the moment, but the vast majority of them tend to be head down, bum up, cafe racers.  In fact, Dirk and his crew at Kingston Customs in Germany have already blown us away withone such CX earlier in the year.  So, when a customer approached Kingston with the brief that he needed an ultra reliable, everyday bike that he could ride off road, the CXL 500 idea was born.

Now, we have no idea if the story behind the origins of this project is true or not, but what the heck we like it, so we’ll tell it.  The owner of this bike has horses.  In the summer, he used to ride down to the stables on a cafe racer and the horses used to become restless in the paddock.  One day a horse whisperer told him that it was the aggressive riding position on the bike that made the horses edgy and fearful.  And so the brief for an upright, off-road, less horse aggravating bike was born.  Apparently.

As Honda had built a CX 500 and an XL 500, it was obvious to Dirk that he needed to build a Honda CXL 500 Scrambler.  So a ’79 model bike was stripped completely and the frame was glass bead blasted and modified, before being painted.  Kingston themselves then handmade the seat, the battery box, the front and rear aluminium mudguards, the radiator grill and the 2 into 1 exhaust manifold.

They also treated the engine to some thermo-sensitive coating, fitted some K&N’s, and married up a Speed Products exhaust pipe to the aforementioned manifolds.  The result is a perfectly decent, and totally useable 50hp.

The luxurious looking paintwork was clearly influenced by old Honda Enduro bikes from the seventies.  In fact, the level of finish on this build is so damn good that the bike itself looks like it could have been in the official Honda line up in 1979.  But we’ve come to expect that from Kingston.  Great, original ideas, executed flawlessly.

We wouldn’t be surprised if this particular build divides opinion.  But then we also wouldn’t be surprised if Dirk and his gang deliberately build bikes that challenge conventional thinking and court a little controversy.  And anyway, the horses obviously like it, so who cares.  Thanks to Dennis Zetlitz for the great photos, and thanks to Dirk for once again sharing his jaw dropping (and horse calming) work with us in The Shed. 

top : Coca-Cola Social Media Guard !!

Road Movies: Haunting classic car imagery by Nicolas Dhervillers

Young French artist and photographer Nicolas Dhervillers was commissioned to produce imagery for the recent Festival Automobile International in Paris. As you can see in our gallery, he uses eerie, deserted backdrops to bring the beauty of his chosen subjects to the fore...

Dhervillers' project, entitled 'Road Movies', sees the carefully selected classics deployed in settings dripping with atmosphere. The works hint at an underlying story much like a movie still would – with the cars invariably functioning as getaway vehicles, objects of beauty, or even cannon-fodder for gun-toting cowboys.

Further information about Nicolas Dhervillers' work can be found at nicolasdhervillers.com.

You can find thousands of beautiful classic cars for sale in the Classic Driver Market.

YAMAHA SR500 ‘MEZZOMILLE’

If you live on mainland Europe and have a penchant for Yamaha café racers, then you probably know Kedo. The German company is one of the largest SR500 specialists outside Japan, supplying everything from bodywork to engine parts.

Kedo’s Daniel Doritz has a history of hooking up with custom builders, most notably with Jens vom Brauck of JvB-Moto for the sublime D-Track. ‘Mezzomille’ (meaning ‘half-thousand’) is his latest dalliance, this time with Axel Budde—a fellow Hamburg native, and best known for his Kaffeesmaschine Moto Guzzis.

Budde and Doritz share an obsession with quality and a liking for understatement. And this lean, minimalist SR500 café racer has obvious DNA from both partners. “The SR500 has been well established for more than 35 years, so almost every imaginable conversion already exists,” Budde notes. “But there are few properly ‘coherent’ SR cafe racers.”

Budde started by designing a completely new aluminum tank/seat-combination, and slimmed down the frame. Nearly every major part has been lightened or replaced with a handcrafted original—or left out completely. The outcome is an elegant, almost delicate conversion in the style of the late 1970s.

With scarcely 130kg to haul around and almost 40hp on tap, the ‘Mezzo’ majors on agility and riding enjoyment: It has a power-to-weight ratio similar to a spritely middleweight dual-sport like the Suzuki DR-Z400.

Budde and Kedo will not be recreating this machine, given its uncompromising style and the 350 hours it took to develop and build. But the good news is that many of the parts that were designed for Mezzomille will be found in the new Kedo catalog, which comes out in mid-March 2014.

SR500 fans, rejoice.