The rise and rise of the Chinese motorcycle industry has been nothing short of amazing, with millions of bikes rolling off an almost infinite number of production lines. The criticism has often been around quality, but just this week CFMoto had the world's motorcycling press giddy with excitement, with the brilliance of their 675SR-R sportbike. The custom scene, however, hasn't been as productive but new friendships are accelerating the progress and Hangzhou city's LS Motorcycle has turned their regular trips to Japan into a learning exercise that's producing incredible results. And for the 2024 Yokohama Hot Rod Custom Show, they took with them this incredible 1962 Harley-Davidson PanShovel, and headed home with a well-deserved trophy in hand.

The team at LS Motorcycle are by no means rookies to the game, they've been around for years now, and have largely focussed on building classic choppers to an incredible standard. But they've always known that to compete at an international level, they had to refine their style and take time to learn from the best before they would have a chance of taking home the big trophies. So, over the years they've immersed themselves in Japanese custom culture and developed friendships with the likes of Heiwa Motorcycle and a deep connection with Takahashi-san, who has been a mainstay of the scene, dominating the show circuit under his Kuruma-sakashita Motorcycle banner.

For most of the year, it's a stunning 5000-seat venue, with brilliant acoustics to showcase a nation's top talents, but in early December each year a symphony of a different kind rolls into Pacifico, Japan's National Convention Hall. And lined up outside the venue in the early morning was a record crowd, as the 32nd Yokohama Hot Rod Custom Show came roaring to life. Known to many as Mooneyes, for the company who organise the event, the custom car and chopper show is the most prestigious on the nation's calendar and is arguably one of the world's premier places for builders of brilliant bikes to show off their wares. All the big names from home and abroad were on hand and the quality of customs was once again out of this world.

Gates open at 8 am, but the organisers were greeted by a huge crowd, with people arriving before sunrise and the lines stretching around the block. But the wait was more than worth it for the 24,000 spectators once they made it inside and could finally feast their eyes on what they'd come to see. Each year at the show there is an early highlight, as a selected group of cars and bikes 'Ride-in' to the arena, with the fans lining up for the sights and sounds. To great applause, the legend Shinya Kimura stormed in on a stunning piece of old-school Americana, and it just helps to highlight that these show machines really do run.

If you grew up on MacGyver, then you watched in awe as he fashioned all kinds of crazy devices and disposed of bombs, simply with the junk that surrounded him. And when we first met the brilliant boys from Batakastem Workshop, that was their vibe; given an old engine, some steel and a few bits and pieces, and they could not just make a motorcycle out of it all, but one seriously cool custom. Since that time, the Jakarta, Indonesia-based outfit has grown exponentially, and although they now work with bigger budgets and more fancied machines, they still show they have the ability to hand craft anything the heart desires. So, when a customer wanted to turn his Yamaha XS650 into a flowing Florida-styled chopper, it was simply all in a day's work for the talented team at Batakastem.

Of the many things to admire about our friends from Indonesia, it's not just their ability to run wicked welds barefoot with a $99 machine, but the fact they can build any motorcycle, old or new, big or small, into any style of custom you can possibly imagine. Come up with a crazy combination in your head; chances are they’ve taken that model and turned it into the kind of bike you dreamed of. Head honcho Abraham Simatupang leads his troops with his brilliant design ideas, and he's also a student of the custom scene. This is clear as can be on this Japanese-based chopper, which takes styling cues from the East, West, and Florida scenes.

So you want to be a champion custom bike builder? It’s a dream many aspire to, and who can blame them? But how many truly understand the incredible sacrifices required, the years of hard slog, and the financial hardship that are all part of the process? One young man who has lived the struggle and ridden the highs and lows, is 26-year-old Australian metal fabricator and panel beater, Cody Jermyn. As a kid, he watched the Biker Build-Off on TV, in his early teens, he tinkered with bikes, and by seventeen, he had one foot in the industry. Now, nine years later, he can show the world his first trophy-winning, incredible creation: a 1992 Harley-Davidson XL1200 Sportster, which he has totally transformed into one seriously slick sled.

Like many of the best chopper builders in the business, Cody started with a simple job as a teenage apprentice doing oil changes at a small mechanical workshop. After a few years of spinning spanners, the opportunity arose for him to start his apprenticeship as a fabricator. He used his spare time to learn the old art of the English Wheel by shaping scrap metal. During the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, he completed a street tracker build of a WR450 and soon realised that custom bike building was truly for him. He next finished his apprenticeship and landed a gig at one of Australia’s premier Hot Rod builders, Downtown Kustoms, as a fabricator and coach builder.

One of the great achievements in any custom motorcycle builder's career is to be invited to showcase their wares at a major show. Not only is it an acknowledgement of the builder's skill and recognition of their position in the scene, but for many, it allows them to create a bike that truly pushes the boundaries. For years, SoCal's Dustin Kott has been delivering one incredible custom after another to his extensive client base. However, a call from the organisers of the Born Free Motorcycle Show to be an invited builder at their 15th edition gave him the chance to try something truly unique. Combining all of his skills and mixing the best of bobber, boardtracker, and café styling, the Kott Motorcycles man has delivered this outrageously beautiful 1969 Triumph Daytona 500, known as Bloodmoon.

Last year, we featured another Daytona 500 that rolled out of the Kott workshop—a stunning café racer-styled transformation. That build provided Dustin with a host of ideas for working with the unit construction classic Triumph. So, when a friend had another unwanted example, he was more than happy to take it off his hands. “Having some details fresh in mind and an attachable hardtail, I decided to build a café-inspired bobber. For a number of years, I’ve been contemplating a hardtail project with a girder-style front end. An opportunistic invitation to Born Free 15 presented the motivation to really strive toward a unique interpretation of a unit Triumph build and to bridge, if possible, the gap between chopper builds and café-inspired builds,” Dustin tells us.

If any single human being can lay claim to being the living Godfather of the custom motorcycle scene, it is the Japanese-born, LA living, Shinya Kimura. For the best part of four decades, he's been using his training as a mechanic and his undeniable artistic gift, to craft all manner of motorcycles. They've been featured in the biggest magazines, seen in Hollywood films, won trophies at the elite shows and helped to carve out a reputation that is one of deserved reverence. So, to go full circle, we dive back to the beginning where under the Zero Engineering banner, he built a fleet of production motorcycles in his famed 'Zero Style'. A number of models were developed over the years and this 2012 Type 5-B is currently for sale in Australia, giving us a chance to take a look at what it's like to live with a road-registered masterpiece.

Things kicked off in 1992 when Zero Engineering was established in Okazaki City, Japan as a division of PLOT Inc to build custom-made vintage-styled Harley-Davidsons. The bikes were an instant success, showing up at shows around the world and gaining Kimura-San a reputation as one of the World's most talented builders. To test the waters a number of prototypes were built, that would gauge interest in a production style run and by 2002 the ready-to-ride “Road Hopper” models were being built at the company's US facility in Vegas. The company started with their Type 1 and Type 2, with many more to follow.

From the streets of Sturgis to AMD's World Championship stage and the pages of Easy Rider magazine, legends have been born with bikes that have blown our minds. And one man who is building a serious name for himself is Newcastle, Australia's Liam Butler. Bike mad since a boy and an auto electrician by trade, there is simply nothing he can't do to a motorcycle. Bringing all his skills to the party he's gone back to his roots, crafting one incredible custom at a time, and his latest masterpiece is this mouthwatering Yamaha XS650 by Butler’s Customs & Classics.

“My dad has always been obsessed with bikes and cars owning a million, as has my pop. Having this background I was always keen to start my own business working on bikes and cars,” Liam tells us. Apart from a stint working in the mines, Liam has been an Auto elec and vehicle builder all of his life, and the tale of Butler's Customs has been a whirlwind journey over the past decade. What started in his home workshop would go on to be a full shop next to the restaurant and bar of Aussie music legend Chris Joannou of Silverchair. Amazing connections were made, super cool cars and bikes were built and the business would go on to outgrow two more big shops. But wanting to leave the distractions behind, Liam has returned to his home garage so the only thing that gets his attention is the bike before him.

The link between a custom bike and someone living the outlaw lifestyle has been there since day dot. Most of those early days, easy riders were dealing with the trauma of war and the Great Depression, and to this day, many a two-wheeled machine is as much about transport as it is a rolling recovery session. This little chopper was built for that exact purpose, a small slice of custom motorcycle fun, to literally ride along the road to redemption. The team at Sydney's Sabotage Motorcycles knew just the man who was going to be in need of such a bike, and with his parole date nearing and a show just weeks away, they spun the spanners on this 1974 Honda CB125 to deliver a chopper that's ready to give one young man a new lease on life.

Yes, you read that right. The customer Andy and Giles have built this bike for is currently inside a big house, with a tough start to life that for now has lost him his liberty. “By the time he was 12, Yeyo was involved in the world of crime and class-A drugs. Now 25, he’s serving a sentence in an undisclosed offenders' institution for possession with intent to supply drugs. During the height of his short but lucrative empire, Yeyo had taste, a taste for craftsmanship and swag, particularly shown in his collection of motorcycles,” Andy tells us.

When you've been part of a scene long enough, you begin to appreciate more the people that power it and those who pour their heart and soul into driving that culture forward. Indonesia's custom bike-building scene has been booming over the last few years, first based around new scooters and small-capacity bikes, and now taking on anything and everything in sight. But as it grows, the unique Indonesian 'no fear, no rules' attitude has stayed well and truly intact. And one of the leaders of the pack is Batakastem Workshop's Abraham Simatupang, who doesn't follow trends, he simply builds one cool bike after another. His latest is this classic Yamaha XS650 cruiser, that's been given a clever chopper vibe and cartoon characters for extra fun. 

In the tight back streets of south Jakarta, Abraham and his team simply live and breathe everything on two wheels. They love what they do and there is nowhere else they'd rather be than in the shop together, designing and building bikes. Like every Indonesian builder we've come across, this team does things their own way, they don't build cookie-cutter machines to get the approval of everyone on social media. So, a client with a hankering for his own Yamaha chopper with a cartoon theme, knew that in Abraham and his team, he wouldn't have to fight to get his own truly unique creation.

Broken down by the side of the road, oil splattered all over your leg, most who pull over to render assistance will enquire as to why you ride a bike that’s so ancient. It’s the life of most who ride a vintage motorcycle and yes, you could own a newer, more reliable bike that is faster, stops better, and handles well too. But there is something about the spirit of the raw mechanical experience of a machine that has truly lived a life of its own. But a new wave of builders and parts creators are ensuring you can have the best of both worlds, and few do it as well as Prism Supply. The North Carolina based outfit's latest is this 1948 Harley-Davidson Panhead, a true American masterpiece.

Brothers Zach and Jake Hindes are the young guns behind Charlotte's Prism Supply and all things mechanical have been pumping through their veins from a very young age. Their facility is a retired Model A Factory and the guy's affinity for the place tells you a lot about the way they work, “What hasn’t changed is our passion to design, create and fabricate timeless, quality parts for timeless, quality machines, just like the building’s predecessor.”