Classified Moto is hardly an American Icon, but if that day ever comes, we can certainly give a lot of the credit to this bike and its owner Adam Ewing.

The bike is a 1982 Yamaha XS650 Heritage Special. The owner is a killer photographer. The combo landed us our first real recognition with a feature on Australia’s BikeEXIF.com in December of 2010. When Adam’s stunning shots hit the motosphere, suddenly it wasn’t just a few of us standing around looking at the bike, there were thousands of comments and opinions coming from all corners of the world.
It was weird and awesome. Since then, we’ve built a lot more bikes, but we’ll always have a soft spot for this one.

Having done a couple of front end swaps using sport bike forks, this one was a little trickier. In order to retain front and rear spoke wheels we decided to modify a Suzuki RMZ250 dirt bike front end then fit it with a sweet supermoto wheel and brakeset. We shortened the fork internals for a nice low stance and powder coated the rear wheel gloss black to match the Warp 9 front wheel.

Some sweet Woodcraft clamshell clip-ons were the ticket for the massive RMZ fork tubes.
The stock power plant responded well to some pod filters a free-flowing exhaust and some healthy jetting. Plenty of power for around town and interstate jaunts.
Special touches abound with some very Classified perforated steel side covers, gnarly tires and all-business look.

We like to give a hint of the bike’s previous life whenever we can, so we managed to save a strip of the old ratty red paint on the tank. A coat of gloss clear over the whole shebang slows the aging process to a crawl.
Look for more tweaks on this one from time to time, since bike and owner are near CM HQ.