Heard from a fellow cafe racer enthusiast recently who shot this most excellent video at an Ace Cafe Reunion a couple of years back. The annual ACR, held in September is one of our favorite events, drawing in thousands of the black leather and low bars faithful from across Europe and around the globe. The…

We’ve just returned from a trip to London where there’s always much to absorb on the custom motorcycle front. We visited The Bike Shed, the UK capitol’s hottest motorbike hangout and came away impressed. The Shed has been staging huge, indoor bike shows since 2011 and the space they opened in the Shoreditch neighborhood four…

The first spell of cold weather is fast approaching Western Pennsylvania and as surely as whitetail deer will hop across the path of a motorcycle this time of year, your streetbike needs some special attention. We’ve written countless times in the pages of Cafe Racer about the importance of setting up your bike for winter…

Lining up talented test riders is a challenge for all motorsports publications. The riders need to be not only highly skilled and adaptable to all sorts of machines, they also need the verbal acuity to express what they’ve just experienced from the seat of an unknown motorcycle into readable, entertaining print. Cafe Racer has been…

We’ve been feverishly butting our heads at the GRM garage as o late in discussions over what the do when customizing the Continental Gt twin we picked up recently. In recent weeks, contributor Blair Powell has been riding the 650 to get a feel for the bike and he’s reluctant to surrender the bike in…

We happen to really dig sidecar rigs here at CRM and our latest October/November issue features two of the mile-munching three wheelers. We’ve been receiving a bit of feedback about the incredible build job and even more fascinating history behind the machine pictured above. This looks like a post WWII BMW R7 equipped with a…

After more than 20 years writing about motorbikes, it’s amazing the oddball imagery that piles up in one’s files. Just recently, while sorting through stacks of Cafe Racer back issues, I came across the above color image by ace shooter Yve Assad. She captured this rider from Southern California’s B.A. Moto custom shop as he…

As fall quickly approaches here on the Eastern parts of the country, our sights this time of year turn Westward. That’s where the major motorcycle manufacturers store all manner of new demonstration models, bikes set aside from the showroom floors for the sole purpose of entertaining us motojourno types. There’s a bumper crop of incredible…

When you run a magazine based on classic and custom streetbikes, we tend to ask a lot of our staffers. Though showing up to ride and wrench on motorbikes may seem, on the surface, like a dream gig, there are many long, unpaid days spent sorting out complex mechanical conundrums. These garage sessions can be…