Most customs live relatively sedate lives: buzzing around the city, maybe a blast into the country at the weekend, and then a couple of hours cooling down outside a café or pub.
If you?ve ploughed hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into a bike, you?re not likely to put it through a torture test. But that?s exactly what LA-based Alex Earle has just done with his latest build. He?s thrashed this Ducati dirt bike for two weeks and hundreds of miles through Alaska?s toughest terrain, and lived to tell us the tale.

?The Alaskan? is only Alex Earle?s second build, but he describes it as a return to his roots. It?s a supremely practical machine, designed for long distance, off road expeditions.
?It?s a middleweight ADV bike with all the necessities and none of the frills,? he says. ?Rugged and capable.? And also, we might add, very sharp-looking too.
Alex is a man with his finger on the pulse. He?s a designer at VW America, and three years ago anticipated the current trend for street trackers with a sleek Ducati Monster conversion.
We were curious to see where his current inspiration comes from, and it turns out to be true adventure bikes: not the kind that dawdle through Baja California, but the kind that might tackle the Road of Bones in the Russian Far East.

He?s drawn to ?the experience of thriving in an alien, inhospitable place? and cites the film The Martian as a trigger for this concept. Hence the dusty grey bodywork and the striking NASA-themed logo on ...