Just after midday on the 22nd of February, the streets of Christchurch New Zealand started shaking violently. This wasn?t the first time they had experience an earthquake ? the city is built on a seismic fault line. Not only did the quake kill 185 people but it also left the roads in a terrible way. So when Christchurch local, Chris Penniall from Seven Motorcycles was looking for a new project, he opted for a street tracker style bike that would be able to handle the odd pothole in style. Last year, when he noticed a really cheap Suzuki DR650 come up for sale he thought it would be the perfect post-earthquake donor bike.

It turned out there was a reason the DR650 was cheap ? it was in terrible condition and had been butchered to an inch of its life. ?Someone had cut the back of the subframe off behind the seat and stripped the tank to bare metal and painted the wheels black,” Chris tells us. ?It was like they were trying to build a post-apocalyptic Classified Moto style bike but with about 5% of the finesse. It didn’t bother me as those bits were all going to get binned or modified anyway.?
For the first time, Chris started the build by drawing a design in CAD. ?It really helped to visualise the proportions first time,? he tells us. ?Then the tail section, front number plate, licence plate mount, seat pan and electrical tray were laser cut in aluminium from the drawings. Every bracket or mount I could, I also had laser cut to keep the accuracy up and the tim...