Tearing down and rebuilding a motorcycle into what you want it to be is a long, involved process. Just ask Jason. A year ago, YouTuber Chiefpep had a vision to transform a classic Yamaha XV750 into a custom cafe racer of his own design. That vision has become reality during the past year, and his video series shows exactly how he did it.

Back in January Chiefpep began the series by showing us the basketcase XV750 he picked up. He broke it down into pieces and took it home in the back of his car. Then he reassembled the bike around the engine so he could get an idea of what the original bike looks like. Then he created a mockup in Photoshop of what he wanted the end result to look like. At this point, the real work began.

He pursued both creating the bike's new looks as well as restoring the old parts at the same time. Though it may seem counterintuitive, that's probably the way I'd do it so I could switch between projects when I got bored with one of them. Then he focused on rebuilding the engine for a while, which makes sense in an extensive build like this. He mixed and matched various Yamaha parts from the Virago, XS750, and XJ900 Diversion to create a truly custom build. Some more problems reared their ugly head during assembly and testing, which always happens. His most recent video shows the bike starting and running beautifully, despite the vacuum lines being run improperly to the fuel petcock. His next stop will be the dyno.

I admit I haven't watched all of the videos in this playlist, the first video of which is linked above. It would take many hours. But this might be a good way to entertain yourself over the holidays, particularly if you don't have a project bike of your own. Maybe it'll motivate me to get around to fixing my Honda Shadow ACE 1100.

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