Building your own custom motorcycle is an incredibly rewarding experience… until it isn’t anymore. The owner of this 1976 Honda CB550F can relate. After taking a crack at rebuilding it himself, he threw in the towel and decided to hand it over to a pro shop, rather than let it become another abandoned shed build.…
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Most customers approach a bike builder with a firm idea of what they want, armed with fat binders of photos and sketches acting as inspiration. But the most interesting builds come from people like the owner of this old Beemer—who wheeled it into Federal Moto’s workshop and said “have at it.” And that’s quite the…
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Sometimes, a strange sequence of events sparks a lasting friendship. In this story, a sketchy eBay purchase and a work commission led the talented Chicago photographer trashhand to a local custom motorcycle workshop, Federal Moto. That connection led to a rock-solid relationship, built on mutual respect and trust—and this custom BMW motorcycle.
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The year is 1986, and Tom Cruise is playing Maverick in Top Gun—flying an F-14 Tomcat by day and tearing around on a Kawasaki GPZ900R by night. If you fell in love with that film and the bike ridden by its motorcycle-mad star, you’re not alone. “We all know that movie,” says Michael Muller of…
Read more »Some custom shops crank out the same style of build, over and over again. But for Federal Moto that would be terminal.…
Read more »Federal Moto have the Midas touch. The builds coming out of their Chicago workshop are sharp-edged, compact and big hits with our readers.…
Read more »Milwaukee’s Mama Tried Show is one of the most eclectic shows on the calendar. Choppers, flat trackers and café racers all vie…
Read more »Ex-girlfriends have a habit of leaving things behind, but a motorcycle is rarely on the list. Yet that’s exactly how Federal Moto…
Read more »The holy grail of most custom builders is to develop a signature style. But there’s no exact science to this. It can…
Read more »The modern custom scene was built on a sturdy foundation of cafe racers, bobbers and trackers. But there’s a new wave emerging—modern…
Read more »From the moment their first build hit the airwaves, we’ve followed Federal Moto’s career. The Canadian crew has produced one killer bike…
Read more »Is ‘scrambler‘ the most overused description in the custom scene vernacular? Probably. It’s been allocated to everything from street bikes with upright…
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