FaceliftWhat do you do when you're a broke-ass, 20-year-old college student with more time than money who wants a late-model sportbike but can only afford a clapped-out 1993 Honda CBR900RR with peeling paint, a serious oil leak and no second gear? You take that 12-year-old bike, tear it down and rebuild it from the ground up (polishing the frame and rims while you're at it), and then give that bad boy a facelift by grafting a CBR600F4i headlight into the upper fairing so it looks as sharp as anything else made in this millennium. That's what Kaan Aya of Grand Rapids, Michigan, did with this bike here, using "lots of fiberglass" in the process, before covering the freshened-up fairing (and the rest of the bodywork) with a coat of candy tangerine from House of Kolor topped with custom decals from www.alloutgraphics.com. Aya did all the work himself save for the engine/tranny rebuild (handled by Performance Motorsports), and he rides the bike all summer long with GRStreet Riders in western Michigan.
Deep PurpleYamaha's snub-nosed YZFs from the mid-'90s are often overlooked now, ten years after they first appeared, but Thomas Perry shows that these bikes look anything but out-of-date when hit with some new-millennium custom mods and extra-clean paint. Perry's 1996 YZF600 features a 12-inch-over extended swingarm, polished frame, chromed factory wheels, and a Vance & Hines exhaust and ignition mods. The candy brandywine fade custom paint with silver graphics is tasteful and looks great on top of all that chrome, insuring that Perry's decade-old YZF looks just as good as any newer machine on the local streets of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he rides.