Marcus Walz made his bones building extreme choppers in the 90s. But as the new wave café racer scene blossomed, the founder of WalzWerk Motorcycles pivoted towards more contemporary custom build styles. WalzWerk now builds around 100 motorcycles a year?and at least 80 of those are classic BMW boxers.
That sort of output demands a steady stream of donor bikes, so the WalzWerk crew is always on the hunt for suitable candidates. ?We buy around 120 BMW R80 and R100 Monolever models a year,? says Marcus, ?The majority come from relatives, heirs, and survivors?and almost every one of them has a personal, and often tragic, story behind it.?

The history of this 1987 BMW R80 was so compelling that, once he’d heard it, Marcus decided to keep the bike for himself. The idea was to customize it according to WalzWerk’s popular ‘Schizzo’ template?but to keep as much of the original patina intact as possible as a nod to its provenance. The story goes that the BMW R80’s sole owner, ‘Mr. H,’ bought it in 1987 from a BMW dealer in Hamburg. At the time, you could spec the R80 with a second front disc brake, a windshield, and a set of Krauser cases; Mr. H ordered just the cases and immediately put the bike to work. Over the next 30 years, he and his wife racked up over 300,000 km [about 186,400 miles] on countless trips across Europe.

After Mr. H passed away, his wife mothballed the BMW?dragging it out of the garage only once so that a local mot...