The Custom Builders

Flying Spanner Workshop

- Harry Fisher

If there’s one thing I love about this job, it’s meeting people who have such a passion for motorcycles that they have made them their life, no matter in what sphere. You don’t tend to find too many people who work with them simply because ‘it’s a job’. Generally, it has been a conscious decision to combine life, work, and passion.

You don’t always see these people in large, fancy buildings, either. Some of the most interesting are to be found in discrete back-street workshops, working happily away, letting the quality of their work do the talking for them, and getting work by word of mouth.

Steve Knapp is one of these. He always had a passion for bikes and he spent many years in advertising before starting up his own custom bike shop about six years ago.

‘I got my first bicycle when I was six or seven and it wasn’t long before I thought, ‘it would be better if it had an engine!’ I got my first bike when I was 9, a Yamaha TY50, messing around in the quarries and mine dumps in North East England. I had an uncle who was big into bikes - he still is in his 80s - so I picked it up from him. He gave me a DT175 and it just went from there; the addiction set in at an early age.’

I asked him when he customised his first bike, expecting him to tell me it was in his twenties or thirties.