"What the hell is a Suzuki Goose!?" Well I'm glad you asked. Suzuki unleashed the Goose on the Japanse automotive market in 1992. Originally the motorcycle was a 350cc but for some crazy reason they decided a 250cc version was also required. In standard guise the Gooses air cooled, 4 stroke single cylinder engine produces about 30bhp and has a top speed just shy of the ton. In it's standard dress the Goose isn't a pretty bike (bet the name had you fooled though), it's a bare bones, entry level, naked bike with similar styling to the Suzuki Hornet. So as you can imagine Gull Craft had a fair bit of work to do to get this Suzuki looking this good.


First off though the engine needed more power so a Yoshimura piston and Cam were installed and the capacity increased to 376cc. To feed the now much thirstier thumper a Keihin FCR 39mm Carb with a Gull Craft carbon fiber velocity stack was tucked up inside the frame. Gases are expelled via a custom stainless exhaust which when combined with the other performance upgrades takes this Goose in to Ton Up territory.


Handling has also received an upgrade with a Yoshimura forks and an Ohlin shock on the rear. A lighter Over Racing swingarm and Bito Magtan rims have replaced the factory units and stopping power now comes from a Lockheed (front)/Brembo (rear) combination. Gull Craft specialise in custom fairings and body panels so all of the original Suzuki fairings were handed to the gods of garbage. The Type R Gull bikini fairing and the one off tank and tail section were all built in house. The Gull team also fabricated a large list of parts fitted to the Suzuki including the mirror, rear sets, carbon fender, fender goose neck mounts, speedo surround and filler cap.


With small engine capacities weight reduction is a no brainer. The new bodywork was a good start but it wasn't enough so the engine covers were cut, drilled, smoothed and polished, exposing usually hidden sprockets and chain. Polished aluminium parts now reside where heavier Suzuki components once lived and the frame was simplified and cleaned.

Finally the paint was all done in house at Gull Craft. The colour scheme took its lead from the finish of the new suspension and wheels. It's a very royal looking colour combination of gold against polished silver with a splash of vibrant green. If this Goose laid eggs they'd probably be gold.

Motohangar is a custom motorcycle workshop based out of Vienna, Virginia. With services ranging from general maintenance through to specialised custom builds, fabrication and even custom paint and graphics, their team can pretty much complete any project you put in front of them. So when a group of guys as capable as this decides to build their own custom motorcycle you can bet it's going to be something pretty unique.



This is the Motohangar Honduki. It's their solution to the fact that you can't find many new two stroke road bikes any more. The Honduki is a Frankenstein bike made up of parts from various Suzuki and Kawasaki motorcycles but it's no fallen angel. It's a well thought out, performance focused build that's sure to put a smile on any riders face.


The Honduki was originally a 3 cylinder 1975 Suzuki GT550 which produces around 48HP. The engine and the gas tank are the only unmodified components on the bike with everything else either being pulled from other bikes or fabricated by the Motohangar team. The build includes a completely custom subframe, seat, and tail section all built in house. The front suspension is from a 2005 Suzuki GSXR600 while the rear swingarm and wheel are from a 2006 Suzuki SV650. The rear suspension is from a Kawasaki 636 and the expansion chambers had to be taken from a Kawasaki H1 to fit the frame and work with the engine.

Customising a 125cc motorcycle isn't what a lot of Cafe Racer lovers would consider. With so many bigger bore motorcycles available and plenty of wide open roads, big bore bikes are the obvious choice for a Cafe Racer conversion. However in the heavily populated cities of Asia big bore bikes are a rarity. Their weight and power make them unusable in the "heavy traffic". Streets are filled with small bore, light weight motorcycles, buzzing and maneuvering like a swarm of angry bees. These bikes are in most cases the popular transport option for the masses so it's only natural that these bikes become the base for custom workshop projects.




One example of a workshop doing this is Thekatros custom motorcycles. Thekatros took a somewhat sleepy looking Suzuki Thunder 125 and transformed it in to this very respectable Cafe Racer aptly named "Wake Up". The little Suzuki had laid sleeping for around a year before it was wheeled in to Thekatros workshop and it's extensive 7 month transformation began.





Every piece of the Thunder's original bodywork was removed and thankfully never reattached. A new tank and custom tail section were hand made by Thekatros and 5mm of foam was fitted to the seat pan to cushion the bumps coming through the now stiffened back end. A custom exhaust and silencer were also fabricated and fitted to make the most of the engines power and sound. To finish the look of the bike off a gold highlighted colour scheme was applied and complimented with brass grips from POSH, an airbrushed air cleaner cover and winged side panel motif (all painted in house at Thekatros).

This little Suzuki Thunder may only be 125cc but it packs plenty of visual punch.





Spec Sheet 
Front Tire : Cheng Shin 90/90-18
Rear tire : IRC 4.00-18
Gas tank : Yamaha RS custom Hornet
Seat : Hand made Thekatros
Side cover : Hand made Thekatros
Silencer : Hand made Thekatros
Carb filter : VW
Rear Shock : Steel pipe 3/4 mm
Front Shock : Stock-extended 150 mm
Head light : H3 with custom paint
Rear light : Oval
Hand grip : Posh
Engine CDI : BRT
Coil : Shindegen
Painting by Thekatros

Ask yourself this question: Would your wife or girlfriend let you use her designer leather handbag to make a seat from? Well, Filip Bardy, the Slovakian owner and builder of this sweet GS1000 managed to convince his girlfriend to donate her handbag for a "higher purpose". You see, there aren't a lot of motorcycles or bike parts in downtown Slovakia. So Filip had to be resourceful, and if that meant chopping up his misses' 2010 spring/summer collection, then that's what he had to do. To be honest, black leather was soooo last season, anyway. 

At the U.S. press introduction for the 2011 GSX-R750 and GSX-R600 models this past weekend at Barber Motorsports Park in Leeds, Ala., American Suzuki Motor Corporation generously donated the first production 2011 GSX-R750 in the United States to the impressive motorcycle collection at the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum.

The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum was founded by George Barber in 1994 as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to the presentation, interpretation, exhibition and history of motorcycles, vintage vehicles and motorsports. The collection on display at Barber Vintage Motorsports Musuem, according to Museum Director Jeff Ray, is considered the world’s largest collection of motorcycles, and features an eclectic array of models from around the world, spanning over 100 years of motorcycling history.

Suzuki donated this groundbreaking new sportbike to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum to both contribute to the Barber museum’s collection and cement the legacy of the revolutionary Suzuki GSX-R750 model for the public with a new 2011 model representing the innovative technology and performance of the GSX-R series.

“We are very honored to contribute this GSX-R750 to the Barber museum’s impressive collection,” said Suzuki’s Motorcycle/ATV Division Senior Communications Manager Steve Bortolamedi, “the GSX-R750 model, like the Barber museum itself, is an institution representing a commitment to power, technology and the history of performance motorcycling. It’s an honor for Suzuki to contribute this incredible sportbike to this remarkable collection.”

The donated 2011 model was signed by the Suzuki staff present, and now resides in the museum’s permanent collection overlooking the racetrack at the Barber Motorsports Park.

For more information on the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum, please visit www.barbermuseum.org

For more information about Suzuki, please visit www.suzukicycles.com

Share

 It’s a rare region of the U.S. consumer market that doesn’t have at least a few agencies hard at work figuring out how to get their products on the consideration list of younger Hispanic and African-American consumers. But if that terra incognita exists, it’s probably somewhere in the world of motorcycle marketing. That’s partly because, for motorcycle makers, the culture is the bike: when you get a motorcycle you swing a leg over it and emigrate to a nation with its own culture, language, rules, passport.

Bike subcultures, from a market-activation perspective, are touchy ideas and very strongly defined by segment — especially the cruiser motorcycle segment, into which marketers inject just about all of their lifestyle and self-identity messaging. For categories like dirt bikes and sport bikes, it’s about the machine.

Consider sport bikes for a moment and one can see why motorcycle makers might be a bit, um, reticent about focusing on anything beyond the bike itself and how well it rides. These machines have become a lot closer to racing bikes over the years. Many are very high-performance machines with big displacement and ergonomics informed more by the necessities of track racing than street riding (the drop-bar positioning means the rider is prone for aerodynamics, not upright for awareness, etc.). And their combo of sexiness, testosterone, performance, and derring-do appeals to younger riders. You don’t have to be a genius to see where that road leads. Anyway, the bikes speak for themselves — why muck up the business with pop-culture activation. Leave that to cars, right?

Not for Suzuki Motorcycles. The company has been rethinking that notion when it comes to its sport bike lineup by pitching directly to the multicultural, urban market melting pot with an integrated marketing program around music and street culture that is more like the kind of marketing automakers have been doing for brands like Scion and Honda Civic than anything motorcycle makers have ever done.

The effort, Busa Beats (BusaBeats.com), via AOR San Francisco-based digital agency Questus, centers on a social media hub and virtual recording studio for would-be rappers to choose from an array of beats to use as backing tracks for their own rhymes. The point of it all is that the best rhyme-smith wins a Suzuki Hayabusa sport bike. The catch is that the rhymes have to be about the Hayabusa (thus “BusaBeats”).

The competition, which is heading into its third year, culminates in a virtual “MC Battle” with winners chosen by popular vote and a panel of MC (not “motorcycle club”) judges. The winner also appears at Suzuki events across the country, and in one case went on to sign a record deal.

Questus founding partner Jeff Rosenblum says the ultimate goal is to reach a discrete audience, “and communicate with them in way that’s more emotionally driven than any way spoken before by bike manufacturers. This is different in a lot of ways from how motorcycle manufacturers tend to treat audiences — namely in a monolithic way, by market segment,” he says.

Rosenblum says that next year, the focus of the campaign will be less on the Hayabusa and more on the GSX-R (“Jixer” in the parlance), which has, in recent years, replaced the Hayabusa as the sport bike icon of the brand.

“Thus in promoting the Hayabusa we are believers in immersion, going to events, studying social media — everything you can do. Second, always challenge what you hear from the client. Usually they are right, but not always. Bikes are not just about performance, but also about an emotional connection. It’s about how we make that connection,” says Rosenblum.

A customized version of the bike is the grand prize. But the win for Suzuki is the media play. Rosenblum says Busa Beats has racked up over 800 custom songs about the Hayabusa motorcycle with over 200,000 plays and an average of eight minutes on site listening to the songs and 21 minutes during the battle.

“All the guys who made songs generated earned media on the social Web, with people listening and being driven back to the main hub. We had this year over 200,000 plays of all the songs and over 21 minutes spent on site during the heat of battle,” he says, adding that since there is no cash reward — just the bike — there is a built-in demographic and psychographic filter: you have to be interested in sport bikes.

He says the campaign has paid off in buzz and opinion of the brand. “What we do is compare paid media to positive social sentiment,” says Rosenblum. “After this campaign there was a very high degree of positive sentiment about Suzuki in social-media spaces.”

Written by Karl Greenberg for mediapost.com

Share

by William Sidney for Old Bike Barn

Trying to find Motorcycles Parts Especially vintage Japanese and European motorcycles can make the task of rebuilding or restoring one of these bikes practically impossible…
(more…)

Share