Written by Martin Hodgson
Known as the one with the ‘wrongful impulse to hoard, to accumulate beyond what one can use and to refuse to share with others’, no he is not the bloke on your street stockpiling mountains of toilet paper, but the great dragon of The Hobbit, Smaug. This was the creature that came to mind when Charles and Enzo from Panache Customs stood back to admire their latest build. A French workshop renowned for their incredible attention to detail and brilliant build quality. They’ve once again taken on the challenge of building a Yamaha XS360 custom and delivered a fire breathing result that’s nearly impossible to slay!

But there is one thing the mythical beast and the man-made machine definitely do not share in common. While millions have read the work of Tolkien, the twin-cylinder Yamaha remains a largely unknown and forgotten gem. While their key rival Honda was filling showrooms with four strokes, over at Yamaha it wasn’t until the mid to late ’70s that they realised the two stoke smoke was definitely going to be a thing of the past. So while the CB360 is nearly identical in every way and had the advantage of being a known commodity, the XS360 is nearly impossible to fault with a few added improvements.
The rarity of the model is one of the reasons the client chose the bike in the first place. ?We found this XS360 in the surroundings of Stuttgart, Germany. Faithful to the reputation according to which Germans pay pa...