Yamaha XV750 Manga Motorcycle

The Yamaha XV750 is a popular donor for custom builds: cheap to find and well supported with parts. The owner had already rebuilt the engine and arrived at the workshop with plenty of ideas. Purpose Built Moto boiled them down to three guidelines: raw, slim and drawn as sharply as if the villain of a Japanese anime rode it. The bike comes out for weekend rides into the hills behind the Gold Coast and otherwise sits at home as a showpiece. It already had the USD fork of a Yamaha R6, which made it sit too low and the steering nervous. Instead of masking that with rock-hard springs, the fork legs were raised internally by 30 mm, and a custom-built Ride Dynamics shock works at the rear. The tail carries a short seat frame bent by hand from 10 mm round bar with a torch and a vice. The tail light, made from LED strip and stainless mesh, hides in the gap between seat and frame and casts a glow onto the rear tyre at night. The brushed nickel tank carries the silhouette of a samurai helmet combined with the Yamaha speed block and the workshop logo, with some parts picked out in military green. With Mikuni round-slide carbs, a hand-built 2-into-1 stainless exhaust and everything stripped back to the essentials, the XV750 weighs 195 kg fully fuelled instead of 238 kg in stock form.