Thanks to Joel for this post, we like happy customers.

‘Where to start? Well the beginning seems like a pretty good place but that was 19 years ago when I first saw a brand new Katana in a showroom in Tokyo, realised they were still being made for the Japanese home-market and promptly fell in love.

The big Kat had been the stuff of teenage dreams from the early 80s and a shiny new one was now sitting in a crate in the car-park of the advertising agency I was working for at the time. A bank loan and numerous phone calls and faxes to Japan had secured its voyage to the UK.

The silver beast then went on to spend most of its life sitting in my mate’s garage in Brixton (thanks Dan). It did get taken out but it also spent much of its time being polished. But when it was taken out, love it as I did, I became more and more aware of its shortcomings due to riding with Dan on his Blade and Daz on his GSXR600.

I had the grunt but no brakes to speak of, dubious suspension, slightly flexy frame when really pushed and questionable tyres. A plan began to form. I knew exactly what I wanted. Keep the Kat’s original look but upgrade its performance in terms of stopping and handling. The lines from the pencil of Hans Muth are beautiful and shortening it or kicking up the seat would have been stupid and frankly criminal.

So I took the Kat to a specials builder who shall remain nameless for crimes against engineering. The final result was shocking and in the words of Steve a ‘death-trap’. I limped home, broke down on Baker St, put the bike in the garage and forgot about it for about 3 years. My heart was broken.

Then on the verge of selling mine (I couldn’t bear to even look at her) I came across the Lucky7 Katana on the most excellent Old Skool Suzuki website (www.oldskoolsuzuki.info) now this was a proper bloody Kat. It had attitude by the bucket load but wasn’t daft like some of the German monstrosities. Steve (Lucky7) and I started chatting via the site and he offered to help me finish my project and get the Kat back on the road where it belongs.

He picked her up and we started plotting. Some money from a redundancy pay-out (I took them to court and won) was earmarked as budget and the strip down and rebuild began in earnest. The brief was essentially build something that makes the most of the available power but also stops and handles, something that Pops Yoshimura would have been proud of.

And Steve did a bloody brilliant job. Along the way there were a couple of unexpected digressions like the frame bracing by Allan ‘Strangewayz’ this man is an artist with a welding torch. Or striking up a friendship with a Yoshimura supplier in Japan and getting a great deal on some highly exotic rear-sets. Then I got silly on eBay (it happens to the best of us) and bought a brand new rack of Mikuni Flat-slide carbs. The power delivery is now mental but wonderfully so.

The thing that I love about Steve’s work is the attention to detail, the level of which anyone with OCD could feel proud of. When you look at the bike you see something, then something else, then another detail. It’s dripping with understated engineering exotica. It’s been on the road more in the last year than for most of its life. My better half, Ophea, reckons that people gawp at it constantly whenever we’re out on it. And you’ll hear it before you see it with those pipes. Not rudely loud but what a gloriously riotous burble!

Thing is I got my bike back, just the way I wanted it but with loads of clever extra touches from Steve, and I’ve fallen in love with the Kat all over again’