Warming the engine0
Build 07 / 12 · Rotterdam, 01:40, raining
Hand-built café racers from a two-bay garage under the Maas bridge. We open when the city closes, and we finish one bike a month.
01 Rev it
A 1968 air-cooled parallel twin, bored to 790cc and rebuilt from the crank out. We re-phased it to a 270° firing order, so it lopes like a V-twin at idle and pulls clean to 8,500.
02 The build
01 / 04 · Tank
Hand-beaten from 1.2 mm aluminium over a wooden buck, then twelve coats of piano black, wet-sanded between each. The pinstripe is 23-carat gold leaf laid by one brush — Marit's — in a single breath per side.
02 / 04 · Engine
Every cooling fin is hand-dressed with a file, the cases vapour-blasted then polished to a mirror. Brass unions and fuel taps are turned on a 1954 lathe in the back bay. It idles at 1,100 and never leaks. We check.
03 / 04 · Seat
Vegetable-tanned Tuscan hide, 3 mm thick, quilted in a diagonal stitch that takes eleven hours at the bench. It will darken where you sit and crease where you tuck in. That is the point.
04 / 04 · Wheels
Eighteen-inch alloy rims laced to polished hubs with forty stainless spokes each, tensioned by tapping and listening until every one rings the same note. Up front, a 320 mm floating disc that looks nothing like 1968 and stops like it isn't.
03 The 2027 waitlist
Each build takes fourteen weeks and starts with a night in the garage: you, us, a donor engine and a lot of coffee. A €5,000 deposit holds your month. It is refundable until we cut the first tube.
You're on the list for No. 05. We'll call after midnight — keep the phone on.
04 The garage
Nightshift started in 2011 as two dock mechanics working the hours nobody wanted — ten at night to six in the morning, in a borrowed bay under the Maas bridge. The hours stuck. So did the rain.
Fifteen years later there are four of us, two bays and a neon sign that has buzzed since the night we hung it. Nobody answers the phone before dark. Everybody answers it after.
“I asked for a motorbike. They gave me a reason to ride at three in the morning.”
— Joris V., owner of No. 112