For the latest real world, real rider review in our Field Test series, we gave Corazzo’s stylish unisex Shop jacket to east coast vintage racer and Vespa Soho service manager A.D. Crawford to break in when he wasn’t busy working on bikes or enjoying short walks to bars. Can a $179 textile jacket really serve the everyday needs of a real rider? Click below for the feature.
Normally home to 150 Bison, 3,000 or so people and located 22 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, Santa Catalina Island hasn’t seen motorcycle racing for 52 years. Last weekend it did again, hosting a revival of the Catalina Grand Prix. Modern enduro machines competed alongside races for period scramblers on a mostly-dirt course just outside the island’s biggest town. Hell For Leather reader Sean Smith flew over to The Airport in the Sky in a Piper Comanche, snapping aerial shots on the way, and created this photo feature for us. Click below for the link.
Tucked halfway down a side street in the heart of Williamsburg and surrounded by families of old Italian mobsters, Brooklyn Moto is a converted auto shop that’s now home to Harneyboy Bikes and BM Cycle Works. While Harneyboy creates vintage Frankenbikes just becuase, BM Cycle Works specializes in fast and seriously dedicated track machines. There’s also parking for all their buddies, a trash can dedicated to empty PBR cans and a giant flatscreen for video games. The Miley Cyrus pinups are just there to fuel your jealousy of mancaves that are better than yours. Click below for the feature.
Half way through our 3,500-mile+ ride through Labrador, Wes crashed the BMW F800GS heavily, sending it cartwheeling down the gravel road at highway speeds. Hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, much less a BMW dealer, how did the bike fair? Click below for the feature:
We had the Bushwick Murderhaus’s self-professed crash expert, Al Christod, put the latest Overlord Prime jacket from Icon through the ringer. How did it hold up? Click below for the NSFW feature.
Field Test: Icon Overlord Prime jacket
Editor’s note: This and other similar Icon jackets have survived crashes while protecting their wearers at over 100mph.
An Italian-American with a mouth as salty as they come, Frank Giannini is one of a handful of trusted master builders who restores and maintains the famous Team Obsolete collection. Descending into Frank’s basement, where he builds and restores racing machines as Giannini Racing for clients all over the world, is a lot like descending into the batcave if Bruce Wayne kept a tasteful 3 story mansion in the middle of an old New Jersey suburb. The basement is revered among vintage racers, and is absolutely overflowing with rare pedigree racing machines and parts in various stages of restoration. That engine on the floor stuffed behind the factory Aermacchi 250? Just your average sandcast ex-Works Imola 750ss. Click below for the feature.
Located in Manhattan’s Alphabet City — traditionally a center of Puerto Rican culture, though increasingly full of NYU students, European upper-crusters and Japanese hipsters — 6th Street Specials is one of the great East Coast bastions of all things two-wheeled, motored, British and vintage. While the usual custom bobbers, choppers and ultra-rare cafe racers are packed in like sardines, the real love here is flat track racing, which is treated more like religion. Click below for the feature:
The 2011 Aprilia Shiver 750 is finally coming to the States. It’s seriously cheap for an exotic Italian, looks the business and promises boatloads of courteous, law-abiding V-twin fun. We took it to the heart of industrial Bushwick in Brooklyn and beat it up.
Click below for the feature.
There’s a tiny garage in the heart of Brooklyn’s Bushwick, the last building on a dead end street, that houses the builders Johnny Coast and Seth Rosko. While Coast focuses on creating perfect braze-welded steel bicycles by hand to order, Rosko is a touch more crazy. He wrenches on vintage race bikes ranging from standard beaters to ultra-rare Dunstall Nortons, builds parts for those race bikes like hand-rolled megaphones for ex-works Hondas and chambers to spec, is the 2009 and 2010 FIM 50cc N.A. Supervintage Champion, 2010 250 GP N.A. Champion, etc., etc. Since that’s obviously not enough for a day’s work, he also builds bicycles, plus he helps build some of the best skate parks in New York like Greenpoint’s Autumn Bowl and the C-squat ramp. Damned over-achievers.
Click below for the feature. Shop: Rosko/Coast
“No Raping,” said the rule book that came with entry to the Deth Killers S/S ’11 fashion show. You know it’s fashion week in New York when teenage girls from Eastern Europe start swarming the subway and pretentious party invites start filling your inbox. But most fashion week parties don’t come with a rule book and 3D glasses or advertise a punching machine, group burnouts and asphalt-resistant jeans. Those jeans were the reason for the show, but most catwalks don’t end in a punching machine or a drag off-stage via mini-bike for models that don’t punch hard enough, thereby demonstrating the anti-abrasion qualities of the products being shown. Come to think of it, most fashion week models probably aren’t on LSD either. As for the man in a green body suit who decided to hump the back wheel of a bike doing a burnout with predictable results? We’ve got no idea. Extremely NSFW.
Click below for the feature: Happening: Deth Killers S/S2011 Deth Rally
