Mike LaFountain has been working on vintage motorcycles since he was 17, and he?s a perfectionist. His creations are nut-and-bolt perfect; they attract crowds (and awards) at premier events like The Quail, and sit next to other supermodels at the Haas Moto Museum.
Getting to this level of quality can take quite a toll on a builder though. And so Mike recently decided to cut himself a little slack with this Honda CB750. Not that we can tell ?

?A few years back, I built a CB750 for the actor Ryan Reynolds,? Mike explains. ?I was under the impression that I?d be building something with the same fit and finish as my previous work: perfectly polished aluminum, high gloss paint from an exotic supercar and pristine leather. But I couldn?t have been more mistaken.? About a month into that project, the direction changed. ?Ryan began texting me photos of random distressed objects?anything that inspired him,? says Mike.

?Old pipes, raw metal, brass, copper ? anything with patina. That CB750 ended up being as raw and ?unrefined? as possible. And although I absolutely loved the result, I?ve always wondered what that bike would have looked like, had it not gone done the road of Imperfection.?
Cut to a few years later and now we know: ?The Misfit? is the CB750 that could have been.

?During the first build there was quite a lot of R&D,? Mike recalls. ?Which led to lots of parts that didn?t make the final cut.?
?I ended up making two or three of everything: I made two fairings a...