Moto News

The Yamaha DT50MX is the most common 50cc in the Yamaha DT series. Production started in 1978 and ended 1996. The moped is very common in Scandinavia where its leasing competitor was the Honda MT50. DT50MX is available in different colours, such as red-black, red-white, blue-yellow, black-purple and white-pink.

Boasting a 50cc engine and a five-speed sequential gearbox, it is still commonly used by 16-year olds as a means of getting on the road without having to resort to a scooter, a range of aftermarket parts are available including performance reeds, big bore kits, racing exhaausts and sprocket kits which enable the engine to develop more power and/or speed.

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Honda’s NSR 50 is one of the most commonly raced bikes in Minibike club road racing. Though the NSR 50 is not street legal in the United States, safe and legal racing environments are available in many states, often found at kart racing tracks.

The NSR50 has a 49cc water-cooled, two-stroke engine, a manual clutch with six gears, and typically falls into class with other two-stroke 50cc road bikes such as the YSR50. Though, it is also commonly classed with up to 110cc four-stroke bikes.

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A streetfighter is a superbike that is customized by removing the fairing, and making other changes that result in an overall more aggressive look. Made popular by European riders, this type of custom motorcycle is gaining popularity all over the world.

This particular term should not be confused with a street motorcycle or street-use motorcycle, which is a generic term (used by the motorcycle industry) applied to urban street bikes.

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Mini choppers are scaled-down versions of custom-built motorcycles known as choppers and are generally constructed from 1″ steel tubing or 3/4″ steel black pipe. The tube or pipe is bent and then welded together to get the desired angles and shapes of the frame, which is usually custom made.

Mini choppers use a variety of engines although the most typical would be a Briggs & Stratton or Tecumseh horizontal shaft industrial engine with a non-tapered shaft. Other engines include small motorcycle engines and power sport engines such as ATV and dirt bike engines. If an industrial engine is used,some sort of transmission also needs to be used to apply power to the rear wheel. Centrifugal clutches, which allow the engine to idle without moving the chopper, are also used however they result in a fixed gear ratio for both low and higher speed operation. However, some people opt to make a jackshaft, which allows the builder to change the gear ratio to his liking or to change which side the axle sprocket is on.

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A café racer, originally pronounced “caff” (as in Kaff) racer, is a type of motorcycle as well as a type of motorcyclist. Both meanings have their roots in the 1960s British counterculture group the Rockers or the Ton Up Club, although they were also common in Italy, Germany, and other European countries.

Rockers were a young and rebellious Rock and Roll counterculture that wanted a fast, personalized and distinctive bike to travel between transport cafés along the newly built arterial motorways in and around British towns and cities. The goal of many was to be able to reach 100 miles per hour (called simply “the ton”) along such a route where the rider would leave from a cafe, race to a predetermined point and back to the cafe before a single song could play on the jukebox, this was called record-racing. They are remembered as being especially fond of Rockabilly music and their image is now embedded in today’s rockabilly culture.

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The World championship of bike building is a competition annually held by Custom Chrome and the American Motorcycle Dealer (AMD) magazine. The first competition was held in 2004 as an extension of the AMD ProShow Bike Builder contest series held in Europe held since 2002, which by some already was unofficially acknowledged as a European championship The top three finishers from the European championship are rewarded with an entry in the world championship, there are also a number of affiliate events in various countries in Europe as well as in Japan Australia and Mexico. The judging of the events are done by ‘peer review’, in that all competitors collectively decide the winner, together with a select panel of invited judges from the press and aftermaket industry.

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A custom motorcycle is a motorcycle that is highly stylized or which treats aspects such as frame geometry or engine design in an unusual way compared to standard manufacturing. Custom motorcycles are unique or individually produced in a very limited quantity, as opposed to “stock” bikes or “stockers,” which are mass produced. In the 1990s and early 2000s, very expensive customs such as those built by Orange County Choppers, Jesse James’s West Coast Choppers, Roger Goldammer or Ian Barry’s Falcon Motorcycles became fashionable status symbols. There are also companies that are bringing back pin striping, such as Kenny Howard (also known as Von Dutch) and Dean Jeffries from the 1950s, with a continued effort to keep pin striping alive. Some motorcycle enthusiasts feel that the only true customs are those built in a home garage by the person who will ride his or her own creation. The choppers of the 1960s and 1970s fit into this category. Jan Bachleda (originally from Slovakia) of JBIKEZ builds highly customized Triumph choppers from the 1970s era.

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The principal difference between bobbers and choppers is that bobbers are typically built around unmodified frames while chopper frames are often cut and welded into shape. They also often lack most of the chopper’s aesthetic characteristics such as chromed parts and elongated forks. Thus, bobbers are fairly easy to create from stock motorcycles and are generally hand built.

It wasn’t until the 1960’s and 1970’s that the term chopper arrived on the scene. Motorcycle enthusiasts were looking for a way to change their motorcycle again and they did. After the movie “Easy Rider” they had found what they where looking for. Builders started removing parts they deemed unnecessary like the windshield, fenders, crash bars, and even the headlights. If it was for show and it didn’t make the motorcycle run or if it wasn’t holding the bike together, it was discarded. It was after this that the original bobber made its way to be known as a bobber chopper.

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A bobber is a motorcycle that usually has had the front fender removed and the rear fender “bobbed” or made smaller. This style of custom motorcycle took shape in the 1950s and continues to be built today. Bobbers are related to choppers in that they both represent a minimalistic approach where everything is stripped from a bike that is not readily needed. This includes the characteristic rigid frame and shortened rear fender.

The bobber motorcycle came before any other type of custom motorcycle that we see today. When servicemen started returning to the United States from overseas after World War II, they wanted bikes more like the European bikes they had seen. Also, the men had learned many mechanical skills that they wanted to start putting to use. The men started forming biker clubs and eventually started tearing into their bikes and removing the fenders to make them seem lighter like the European bikes. Before there were any such thing as a chopper or even a chopper bobber there was a simple bike, the bobber.

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A chopper is a radically customized motorcycle, archetypal examples of which are the customized Harley-Davidsons seen in the 1969 film Easy Rider.

In the post-World War II United States, servicemen returning home from the war started removing all parts deemed too big, heavy, ugly or not absolutely essential to the basic function of the motorcycle, such as fenders, turn indicators, and even front brakes. The large, spring-suspended saddles were also removed in order to sit as low as possible on the motorcycle’s frame. These machines were lightened to improve performance for dirt-track racing and mud racing.

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