Anyone with an email address knows that the internet is rife with scammers. It’s easy to get hoodwinked if you’re not vigilant?but luckily this particular story has a happy ending. It starts with a scam, and ends with a stunning Moto Guzzi street tracker from one of the UK’s best custom builders.
Before this Guzzi’s owner commissioned it, he was trawling Ebay for a new whip, and stumbled upon a Moto Guzzi V65 that Tom Simpson at Foundry Motorcycle had built. But something felt off, so he reached out to Tom to verify that the advert was legit. It wasn’t.

The phone call wasn’t a total waste, and the guys ended up connecting. ?I let him know that I had a number of the ingredients to make a very similar bike waiting in the donor bike-slash-parts cupboard,? says Tom. ?A few calls later and the build was signed off.? Tom used the older Foundry build from the fraudulent ad as a template, but took this bike in a fresher direction. He used a different donor for starters: a 1994 Moto Guzzi 750 XPA. If you don’t know it, it’s a modified version of Moto Guzzi’s NTX 750 adventure bike, used by the Italian police.

Working from his workshop in West Sussex, Tom tore the bike down to its rolling chassis, and removed ?all traces of Italian wiring.? He stripped the wheels down too, then had the hubs painted in Midnight Blue, before sending them off to Wheel in Motion. They came back laced to a pair of 18? Morad rims, and wrapped in d...