Shinya Kimura's Cafe Sportster

There's a certain blacksmith shop feel to Shinya Kimura's motorcycles, and I mean that in a good way. Looking at the bare aluminum bodywork of his latest creation, this cafe Harley Sportster, you get a sense of the heat and noise and sweat—the sheer effort and long hours—that went into its making. This is an all-metal motorcycle, and metal needs more than casual persuasion to take these shapes. Kimura has been building custom bikes since the 1990s. First as founder of Japan's Zero Engineering, which specialized in low-slung vintage American V-twins, and now as Chabott Engineering, located outside Los Angeles...