Photo: Bolt
Back in the 1980s, Japanese bike maker Yamaha tried another mid-size motorcycle recipe and introduced the so-called XJ650. It turned out to be not such a tasteful recipe, as the model was dropped in just a few short years. But from time to time, the two-wheeler does come back to haunt us, sometimes as custom projects.
We chose such a custom project to bring under the spotlight today, a modified XJ650 born in the garages of a Spanish shop called Bolt Motor Company. If fact, it’s one of their earliest builds, bike number four, born as a hybrid between a bobber and a scrambler, as the crew itself says.
To transform the stock and rather boring XJ650 into the exciting Blue Jeans we have here (we nicknamed it so on account of the colors used on its fuel tank), Bolt needed just two months of work.
After receiving “an outdated bike with very little use,” the crew went to work, and through not-that-extensive-yet-very-effective modifications managed to come up with an industrial-styled machine that wouldn’t look out of place on any of today’s roads and tracks.
The focus of the build, as the shop itself reveals, was to make the yellow headlight as visible as possible, and for that to happen, the smallest possible handlebar with the smallest possible speedometer (made by motogadget) were chosen. Moving further back, the fuel tank has been repainted, and the seat replaced with a fully custom, shorter one, with saddle look and mounted on a modified rear end.
Bolt does not say how much money went into transforming the XJ650 into the Blue Jeans, but if you have one of these in your garage and need it remade, you can contact the shop. Why, they’ll even throw in “an illustration of how your motorcycle would look” so that there’s no doubt you’re making the right choice.
To transform the stock and rather boring XJ650 into the exciting Blue Jeans we have here (we nicknamed it so on account of the colors used on its fuel tank), Bolt needed just two months of work.
After receiving “an outdated bike with very little use,” the crew went to work, and through not-that-extensive-yet-very-effective modifications managed to come up with an industrial-styled machine that wouldn’t look out of place on any of today’s roads and tracks.
The focus of the build, as the shop itself reveals, was to make the yellow headlight as visible as possible, and for that to happen, the smallest possible handlebar with the smallest possible speedometer (made by motogadget) were chosen. Moving further back, the fuel tank has been repainted, and the seat replaced with a fully custom, shorter one, with saddle look and mounted on a modified rear end.
Bolt does not say how much money went into transforming the XJ650 into the Blue Jeans, but if you have one of these in your garage and need it remade, you can contact the shop. Why, they’ll even throw in “an illustration of how your motorcycle would look” so that there’s no doubt you’re making the right choice.
Google News