The coronavirus pandemic continues to shrink into our rear-view mirrors, but its ripples are still being felt in some ways. We continue to hear reports of how the global lockdown either put workshops out of business, or gave both established and aspiring custom builders endless time to bring their projects to fruition. The story of this Honda CB400 café racer includes a little bit of both scenarios.
It’s the work of Alex Style and his newly-formed workshop, Casita Customs. Alex runs Casita, which loosely translates to ‘small house,’ out of a garden shed in Jersey City, New Jersey, with his brothers-in-law, Victormanuel and Cesar Salazar. But he’s actually a British ex-pat who had been living in Shanghai right up until the pandemic hit.
Alex was part of Shanghai Customs—the workshop responsible for the electric eTRACKER that would eventually evolve into the Switch eSCRAMBLER. Then the pandemic happened. Alex managed to hop a plane out of Shanghai just as the country locked down, and soon found himself in New Jersey, “bikeless and bereft,” as he puts it.
“We were all stuck indoors with family; eight in the house with four dogs,” he tells us. “So the three of us decamped to the shed out back in the garden, for our own sanity, and probably for everyone else’s too.”
Casita’s first build was a Honda C90 electric conversion, using leftover parts from Alex’s Shanghai Customs days. But Alex eventually found himself commuting into Manhattan—and the plucky little C90 wasn’t cutting it.
“We found a beaten-up 78 Honda CB400T barn find which wouldn’t start, was rusting badly, and had a pinhole-riddled tank,” he says. “It had had the whole back-end angle-ground off. It was a mess.”
Alex, Victormanuel, and Cesar got to work, tearing down the engine and carbs and putting them back together with fresh sundries. While the bike was stripped, the frame was shown some much-needed love. Alex cleaned it up, de-tabbed it, and welded in a new rear loop—but he didn’t mess with the kinked line of the CB400’s frame.
“The bent bar subframe was a large challenge, structurally and visually,” he explains, “but I wanted to keep that unique element, rather than cutting it off and welding in a standard ‘café racer’ triangular subframe. This meant that the rest of the bike had to work to find those nice lines. It was rewarding to see the challenge pay off.”
“Honda parts are so well designed and bulletproof, we tried to keep as much of the bike stock as possible, including the carbs, controls, fender, rims, and brakes. I was determined to keep that beautiful original tank too, despite it being almost a sieve with all the pinholes. It took endless tins of Redkote, epoxy, and Bondo, but it’s back in business.”
To finish off the rear end, Alex called on a friend in China who does beautiful hand-rolled aluminum work. He supplied a neat rear cowl, which was fitted along with an LED taillight strip. Next, a new seat pan was shaped out of fiberglass, and topped with multiple layers of high- and medium-density foam, to help Alex cope with New Jersey’s potholes.
The seat then went off to Great Buffalo, an upholsterer in Union, NJ, to create the handsome diamond-stitched cover. That and the aluminum tailpiece were the only bits that were outsourced. Everything else on this build was handled by Alex, Victormanuel, and Cesar—including the paint job, which was done in a makeshift tent pitched outside Casita’s shed.
“I’ve always loved Patrick Godet’s 1950s Egli Vincents, with those beautiful lines and black and gold John Player-esque liveries,” says Alex. “So that was front of mind as I set about designing this bike. Inexplicably, I can’t help but ‘Italianify’ people’s names when I give them nicknames, so ‘Vincenzo’ was born.”
A handful of modern pieces were selected to finish off the Honda, including an LED headlight, new clocks, Motogadget grips, and Highsider mirrors. Alex also rewired the bike and installed a small Shorai Lithium-ion battery. And the rusted exhausts were replaced by a shiny new two-into-one system.
We’re glad Alex found something to turn his hand to—but we’re even more stoked to hear that Casita Customs already has a few more projects in the works. In the meantime, if you’d like to see Vincenzo in the wild, you’ll find him roaming the streets of Jersey City or crossing the bridge into Manhattan.
