Honda NX650 Dominator "The Mustard"

The story

As an amateur photographer I wanted to shift more into the custom bike build scene that is not so widely spread here in Slovenia. So I started asking around for people that are involved. Turned out one of the guys I knew back from highschool Ziga Petek was a custom bike builder at Gas & Retro. A few days later we met up to shoot a few photos of his ongoing projects and I quickly fell in love with the idea of owning my own. 

It didn’t take long as a month later I bought a 1999 Honda NX650 Dominator to begin my build. At the start we did not know the route we were going to take. We wanted to take some elements from the previous Dominator builds and add our own touch to it. So we went for the scrambler/tracker look with a retro paintjob but with modern LED lighting. We tried to combine the past with the present.
 

The works

The biggest part of the build was the frame. We wanted to combine elements from the previous Dominator builds and add a bit of our own touch to it. So we cut off the back end and completely redid it. We finished it off by making custom side plates with the number 99 as the bike was made in 1999. As we did not want the bike to only look good, but to be daily rideable as well. So we covered the rear with an aluminium back plate to keep the dirt out.

The gas tank was taken from an old Italian motorcycle brand Caballero. Firstly, the idea was to paint the fuel tank in more stealth color, but in the last minute I changed my mind and went with a more lively Toyota Supra creamy yellow - Hence the bike name "Mustard". As I wanted it not only to “be fun”, but to look the part as well. The whole gas tank graphic design was done by myself.

We wanted the bike to be more leveled so we went with a Moose Racing 18” rear rim to raise the back and shortened the front forks. We kept the original 21” front rim.

The seat was custom made by Ziga Petek and then finished off in a faux leather brown finish by Mitja Bizjak. I didn’t go for black as that wouldn’t do it justice.

As with the lights - we wanted to go for a modern LED look while keeping the round shapes. So for the rear light, we made a custom CNC drilled mount that we welded to the frame. For the front light we went with Koso as it is one of the nicest road legal LED lights you can find. For the blinkers - we picked the smallest ones from Kellermann.

We have redone all of the wiring with a new CDI unit and installed a Motogadget mo.unit as well. The switches are from Motone.

The engine was in really good condition, so we only decided to give it a quick maintenance, cleaned the original carb and painted the engine black.

Owner: https://www.instagram.com/jan_karan/
Builder: https://www.instagram.com/gasandretro/
Painter: https://www.instagram.com/mmavtoworkshop/
Photographer: https://www.instagram.com/rocco.time/