I spent some time with a friend of mine today who I had not seen for several years. We both started our love affair with motorcycles in the mid 1970s but he has his interest rooted in standard production motorcycles, of which he owns some pristine examples. He was unaware of the upswell of interest

Presently everyone seems to want to build a bobber, chopper or cafe racer. Personalised, hand built customs are all the rage. This is great news for us and all those who enjoy these creations. The bad news is that the fundamental principle of capitalism/marketing/sales, basing pricing on supply and demand, has reared its head. People

I am slowly making progress with the dismantling of the wrecked 2007 Bonneville that I bought from Marnitz. There are no shortcuts available and everything has to be stripped down before the fun and creativity of building a desert sled can begin. This is the first modern generation motorcycle that I have undertaken to rebuild

Whilst relaxing on holiday and contemplating how I was going to introduce our first Italian made classic scooter to feature on the blog for 2014, my scatterbrain came up with an old, simple but very influential advertising slogan; "You meet the nicest people on a Honda". To a normally wired brain this may make no

It is clear that Marnitz and I are going to have our work cut out for us this year to prevent Retro Write Up from becoming a BMW airhead custom motorcycle blog. Not that we have anything against the BMWs, but we like to feature customs created from a variety of manufacturers' models and presently

We have regularly voiced our dismay at the awkward appearance of BMW's unfortunate new R NineT café racer. It reminds us of the fable about a vain emperor who is duped by two weavers into believing that they would make him a suit of clothes which would appear invisible to stupid people. The weavers dress

We are thrilled to be able to officially launch our first Speedweek Challenge as part of the annual Kalahari Speedweek at Hakskeenpan ("heel lake") in September 2014. You are all invited to take up our challenge or just come along and enjoy being part of what we believe is going to become an annual pilgrimage

Before we present the final seven motorcycles, please review the selection parameters presented in Part 1 of this feature. The main reason we put this selection together was to nudge you into going back into our archive of features to refresh your memory and possibly see beauties you may not have seen before. Here goes...

When we decided to put our Top 10 for 2013 together, we did not realise how difficult this would actually be to finalise. This blog has existed for nine months and we have featured eighty two different motorcycles; all of which we chose to feature in the first place because we liked them. So, in

There was something about the unbaffled wail of a 4 into 1 exhaust pipe fitted to a 1970's Japanese four cylinder motorcycle which was unique and still stirs my heart today. Back then we would try and identify each Japanese manufacturer's distinctive exhaust note emitted by an open Kerker and other makes of aftermarket silencers