I spend time around people who love old English bikes, and I feel like the Triumph Bonneville T140 cops a bit of flak from the Triumph crowd. Granted, its legendary predecessor, the T120, was a tough act to follow. But while the T140 doesn’t quite have the same allure, it does make for a brilliant custom in the right hands.
Built by the team at Purpose Built Moto from their Gold Coast workshop in Australia, this 1973 Bonneville T140V has been transformed into a very sleek desert sled. Vintage Triumphs aren?t usually their cup of tea, but the PBM gang were more than keen to handle something a little left field. And to make things even more interesting, the bike came to them in a sorry state.

?If you have a nice old bike and you want to keep it that way, make sure you use it,? says Tom Gilroy, ‘Chief of Escapades’ at Purpose Built Moto. ?This project came to us because it had been neglected for so long it was no longer running. Everything had seized up, and without some serious attention it was going to slowly fade away and crumble.?

To kick things off, the entire front end got one hell of a birthday. The forks and brakes were stripped down and rebuilt, with all new finishes applied. PBM fabricated a new front fender and brackets in-house, featuring a looped-over design not too dissimilar from a vintage motorcycle, albeit quite a bit shorter.
The wheel set is one of my favorite parts of this build. It consists of a new set of valanced rims for a bit mo...