Skulls Come Alive on Monster Custom Motorcycle, They Call It 'Canopus'

By they I mean the guys pulling the strings over at Japanese custom shop Bad Land. They’ve been with us for a while now, delighting our senses with incredible, Harley-Davidson-based builds, and opening up new horizons on what it means to be in the custom motorcycle business.

The Canopus is not a Harley-Davidson. That’s obvious as soon as one lays their eyes on it. It has the feel of one, but no frame Harley ever made looked like this, no engine born in Milwaukee had S&S written on it, and nothing evolved from a stock motorcycle can be allowed to look like this.

Canopus was shown by Bad Land for the first time a decade ago, in 2013. That was back when the shop was still relatively young (despite the bike being project number 71 in the Bad Land portfolio, about halfway through to today). It’s also known as the Monster Custom, probably because there are literal monsters all over it.

They come in the form of skulls. Mostly visible on the highly decorated, elevated and pointy fuel tank, they’re also present on the fenders and anywhere where some semblance of a body part is located.

Bad Land does not say where the frame came from. The important thing is it’s here, large enough to hold comfortably in its embrace the S&S engine of undisclosed kind, but breathing through a Japan-made exhaust system. The shape and size of the frame also allow for quite a lot of unused space to unfold between the top of the engine and where the fuel tank meets the frame’s metal.

The high fuel tank is a perfect contrast for the extremely low seat, placed in such a way as to make one wonder how it is possible for the rider to see anything but the tank decorations while sitting there. Luckily, the Bad Land-made handlebars seem in a position that allows for easy reach.

Way, way up front, a 19-inch wheel by RC Components is used to support and partially steer the bike, at the end of a very long fork. By contrast, the rear wheel, size 17 inches and extremely wide (exact size unknown), seems to have been integrated in the rest of the build, partially supporting the seat and rider.

Like many other incredible two-wheeled builds, the Canopus came and went without making a big fuss in the industry. Although we have no info on the ride’s current whereabouts, full details on it are not known, and it didn’t pop up for sale somewhere, we thought to bring it back in the spotlight for a bit as a sort of ICYMI a decade overdue. So here it is. You can enjoy it in full in the gallery above and beware of the mind-boggling details.