Yamaha Scorpio 225 Custom Build

Yamaha Scorpio 225 Custom Build

We’ve known about one of the smaller Yamaha road bikes available for quite some time now. There’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ bike right?!

Through a strange turn of events I found myself riding a very standard 3 year old Scorpio with only 200 kilometres on the clock. I had the pleasure of riding around some beautiful mountain scenery not far out of Maxville on the NSW coast. Even with it’s small capacity (or maybe because of it) I really enjoyed throwing it around the twisties and stayed out much longer than the perplexed owner wanted me too.

Fast forward a couple of years and a new customer and all round good guy Tom mentioned he wanted a build done with the base being a Scorpio. We jumped at the opportunity and after a very long night meeting discussing  details we jumped head first into this build.

As mentioned the standard Scorpio is pretty uninspiring style wise so we really wanted to tear it back to basics. The build we decided on needed equal parts of Yamaha heritage, Island tracker feel (tip of the hat to some of the bikes we’ve seen in from Thailand and Indonesia) and our own design styling.

What we were left with when it was bare bones was a great platform in a super light package. These bikes will do the speed limit already but there’s no point in pointing it up a drag strip. Making it lighter and giving it the retro look was definitely on the cards.

After a bit of back and forth the Yamaha stripes were decided upon. Black and yellow have been done to death so after seeing a pic of the RZ paint job from the 80’s we went with the red/white you see here.

The seat was made with a plastic base and our in-house upholsterer finished it off in Black Naugahyde as you see here. There were a few different options for the tyres but we wanted something semi-aggresive while still not being terrible on the road.

Gauge, indicators and taillight are all POSH items that we already keep on the shelf so the only other custom parts needed were the loop and the guards which we make in our metal fab department.

Once the bike was together we wanted to get some cool shots and being 5 minutes form the beach and with this having an ‘Island’ feel from the beginning we called a good friend of the shop Jon Woods to do what he does best in the photography department. These shots were all taken at dusk with some very crafty flash work that I can’t begin to fathom. #nofiltershere

A big thanks to all the guys involved including Tom for letting us get this great bike on the road.

For further information or if you want something similar, look here.