A year after he turned his custom motorcycle building hobby into a business, Dimitri at Lys Motorcycles figured it was time to level up his portfolio. So he set time aside to build a show bike?a rolling portfolio piece that he could take to events. Going for max. impact, he took a 1982 Honda CBX 1000 and cranked it up to eleven.
It was a hit, and Dimitri was soon fielding the sort of requests that custom builders usually have mixed feelings about; ?Make me something just like it, except for…? That’s the price you pay for cracking the formula.

This particular CBX 1000 is now the third one Dimitri’s built, and came with similar instructions. ?The customer asked for something similar to my first CBX,? says Dimitri, ?but with handlebars instead of clip-ons, and a two-up seat with a cowl. I think that was a deal with his wife.? To kick things off, Dimitri sourced another 1982-model donor?the sport-touring version of the CBX that featured Honda’s ‘modern’ Pro-Link mono-shock system. From his workshop in the northern French region of Hauts-de-France, he applied the same philosophy to this CBX as he did the last one.

The goal was to create an aggressive café racer, with upgraded running gear and an emphasis on the Honda’s mighty six-cylinder motor. Dimitri knocked it out the park; this one’s a total ripper.
For starters, he overhauled the engine with new sundries, then painted the outside with a mix of gloss and wrinkle black f...