Watch This Guy Build A New Custom Bike From Salvage Parts

Are you the kind of person who doesn’t like to waste anything? Do you keep a bunch of parts around because you just know that you’ll use them for something one day? If that’s you, then this is clearly the type of build video that will be right up your alley. It’s a timelapse of several months of work, creating an entirely new custom bike built almost completely out of parts that YouTuber Tahitian Rider—real name Tom—simply had laying around. 

The engine comes from a 1973 Honda CB350 Four, but prior to this build, it was missing a lot of pieces that Tom had to find and rebuild. It wasn’t running, as it was missing several key items including the carbs. He also had a partial frame from a crashed machine that had been parted out. As he explains here, the yokes were broken and unusable, but the frame itself was straight, unbent, and suitable for use in another project—such as this one. 

Now, to be completely fair, if building bikes is how you live your life, then it’s very possible that you’ll have a lot more spare parts laying around in your workshop than the average DIY moto wrenching enthusiast might. That’s clearly the case here, as we see Tom pull out some of the consumables that you’d absolutely want to install new versions of in any bike—such as engine gaskets.  

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Still, all the major parts of this bike seem to have emanated entirely from stuff he had laying around, including a set of carbs that he’d already rebuilt last year and were just sitting on a shelf. Once fitted and vacuum synced, they worked quite well—as you’ll both see and hear in the test ride of the completed bike at the end of the video. 

The parts that Tom didn’t have on hand, he either fabricated himself, or else sourced as universal-fit parts, like a new battery, tank, LED headlight, taillight, and turn signals, and a PVC seat base for the custom seat that he built. A whole lot of work went into this bike, as you can clearly see—and yet, months of work are distilled into a single video that’s just 35 minutes long, thanks to the magic of timelapse. 

The completed project looks and sounds pretty great—and better still, it represents a whole bunch of old parts getting a new lease on life, instead of just sitting in a heap of rust. That’s definitely our kind of reducing, reusing, and recycling.