Lucky for us, there’s no shortage of really awesome custom jobs out there we get to fawn over. Creative minds know no bounds when it comes to personalizing motorcycles. Every custom build represents a vision and there’s something truly fascinating and badass about it. Except when it comes to a custom Monkey—this is when we can’t help but go “d’aaaaw” over the stylish but inevitably cute designs. This Kitako build is no exception and no matter how awesome café racers are, this baby one makes us squee.
Awesome Custom Monkeys:
With its tiny frame, straightforward build, and minimalistic setup, the Honda Monkey 125 is a bike that offers an excellent blank canvas for shops to get creative with. While most jobs we’ve documented so far have more or else preserved the tiny bike’s naked silhouette, this custom takes everything that makes a café racer badass and downsizes it to a Monkey size. The result is this absolutely adorable retro racer with a bubble fairing and clip ons.
The work is that of Kitako, a Japanese manufacturer of aftermarket components for the Big Four’s motorcycles. It pieced together the Monkey 125 Café for the Tokyo Motorcycle Show and brought the bike to the 12th Monkey Meeting in Tama, Japan where the bike was documented by our colleagues over at Young Machine.
The company fitted the bike with small 10-inch wheels, replacing the original 12. The cowl was custom-designed for the purpose of this, however, according to Young Machine, the piece could make it to production. The tiny bike also received a 181cc NEO big bore kit. Suspension at the back has been swapped for a pair of blue reservoir shocks and the exhaust tip has been replaced with a Kitako component. The paint scheme has been made to look like sheets of metal riveted together with an overlaying cherry blossom motif.
The result is a Monkey that looks like it dressed up as a grown up. That makes us want to get your hands on a tiny retro Honda and see where imagination will take us. Considering that brand-new, the bike sells for under $4,000, we're not being too unreasonable.
Source: Young Machine