I first saw these two bikes at Victory MC last week, buried between other machines while they were being worked on, so I asked Mike - the owner of the white SR (or possibly an XT) - to send me a few better pics than the ropey iphone snaps I took outside Victory's arches so I could post them up on the Shed. Mike's inspiration was seeing a hard tail SR400 at the Yokohama Bike Show in 2006. To build his own white bobber, he found a donor bike in an old green dirt bike conversion that hadn't got going for 15 years. Damien's silver bobber started out as a nice clean blue SR from Germany.

Clean and ready to chop

These bikes really are the epitome of simplicity and understated cool. Simple machines with simple aesthetics that just look right. No awards or fanfares needed, no need to gawp at them outside the Ace, (just give them a respectful sideways look) these are proper biker's bikes, built to classic rules and lines - right down to little things, like welding a new fixing point to move the rear fender struts so they radiate from the rear wheel hub, instead of using an off-centre lug that was already there (see the "before" pic above - and mid-modding below) A nice touch, and worth a couple of hours of welding, chopping, bending and cursing.

Who cares if they grip or not. Those tyres really do look the part on a bike like this.

You come here often?

I love the brown seat, funky hub and fat front tyre on Damien's bike almost as much as I like the flat bars, white grips and black hoops on Mike's...