Written by Marlon Slack
Matt Hart?s a photographer – and a damn good one at that. Trawling through his drool-worthy Instagram shows his passion for racing old Porsches and other, lesser marques. But when he was young he lived and breathed bikes, belting around on a little 80cc Yamaha. And lately the moto bug has bitten again. So much so he went out and built this, a gorgeous 1984 BMW R65 scrambler.

?I?m always looking at classifieds for old cars and bikes just for curiosity,? Matt says. ?I found this for a good price not far from where I live.? He saddled up and headed out to take a look at the R65 Beemer. ?When I arrived I already knew the owner, which was a bit of a coincidence,? Matt recalls. The old boxer itself had been sitting baking in the sun for a while but was otherwise mechanically sound. He wasted no time in getting it back to his garage.
?That same afternoon I was stripping it down to a rolling frame and I went about creating a plan,? he says. Which is seemingly easy, given the gamut of custom BMW airheads out there. But there?s a flip side to tackling such a common base for a custom build. ?Black wheels, cut rear subframes, monoshock conversions? they all looked the same to me,? he says.

So Instead, Matt went back to the bike he had when he was a kid – the old Yamaha MX80. ?As a seven-year-old I loved that thing, jumping it and getting it sideways. I was hooked.? So Matt drew on a collection of hundreds of pictures of old scramblers, desert sle...