Written by Marlon Slack
When you?re as good as Suffolk?s Old Empire Motorcycles you don?t need to go hunting for work. Hell, their incredible history of customising classic motorcycles has customers practically begging them to create a bike. And that?s what?s happened with their latest creation, a 1976 Honda CB360 that the client had to harass, harangue and coerce them into building. And we?re all the better for it.

The customer initially approached the team after ogling one of their first custom jobs, a killer little Vulcan CB250. Old Empire, snowed under with work, had to politely decline another project. But the customer wasn?t one to take no for an answer. He disappeared into the ether and started squirreling away parts for the bike he envisioned. A donor motorcycle. Aprilia RS125 forks. And then a year later he struck again. Thankfully for us all they took on the build.
And it was an interesting time for the team, with the customer so smitten with their original CB250 it gave Empire?s Rafe and Alec a chance to reassess their original build. ?As with anything we?ve completed, once it?s done we always look back and wish we had changed this or that or done something differently,? Alec says. ?In this case we had a look at what we disliked about the Vulcan. It wasn?t much, but there were some small things.?

?First was the stance,? Alec says, ?It was too high at the front. So the first thing we did was shave an inch of the Aprilia forks and lowered the top yoke right dow...