The annual Custombike Show in Bad Salzuflen, Germany is lauded as “The Biggest Motorcycle Fair for Customised Motorbikes and Accessories.” The event draws as many as 400 custom bikes and hosts the European Custombike Championship (ECC), which boasted a purse of 12,000 euros this year.
“No matter if a chopper, fighter, bobber, cafe racer, highnecker or daily runner, whether customised from the best professionals of their craft or the wackiest amateur mechanics in Europe – if you can’t find it here, you won’t find it anywhere.”
For 2025, our friend, builder, and correspondent Roman Juriš once again made the 2000-km round-trip journey from his home country of Slovakia for the show. Last year, Roman brought his Yamaha XS400 roadster to compete in the European Custombike Championship (ECC). The XS has a scratch-built frame and patented Progressive Upside Down Fork (PUSDF) assembly intended to minimize dive under braking. We thought it deserved more recognition from the judges, but alas, we don’t make the decisions.
This year Roman rode to the event, doing his best to avoid the German speed cameras along the way. Still, there’s a good chance the payment we sent him will be going to defray the cost of speeding tickets, ha!
Fortunately, we was able to slip in and get a good bunch of “legless” photos of the bikes before the rest of the attendees were let in, plus we have the official photos from the various bikes classes.
Our personal favorite has to be the 1958 Jawa 350 street tracker from our friend Sebastian Brandt of Brandt Customs, whose 1968 MZ streamliner won “Rookie of the Year” at the 2023 Custombike Bike Show. We’ll have a full feature of this bike coming soon.
Below, Roman gives us a short report from the event. His main takeaways? A bit of staleness among the Harley-Davidson builds, coupled with some real creativity and innovation stemming from an unexpected corner: the 50cc class!
Custombike Show 2025: Brief Report
It’s almost 1000 km from where I live to Bad Salzuflen. It’s 1000 km in heavy traffic where you can only occasionally use cruise control because the speed is constantly up and down. This year there have been a lot of speed cameras on German highways, so I expect there will be more speeding tickets.
For this reason, I told myself last year after returning home that I would skip the 2025 edition. But as the exhibition date approached, I couldn’t resist and asked for two days off at work. In 38 hours I did it, slept in a hotel, spent four and a half hours at the exhibition and made the journey home. But what is most important — I didn’t get banned.
With a little trick, I managed to get to the exhibition really early in the morning, before the exhibition areas with motorcycles were fenced off with tape. I tried to take as many photos as possible without disturbing anyone.
Like every year, there were a few great builds or conversions, a good middle ground, but also works that would deserve more effort and better workshop processing. It seems that the H&D category is stagnating. As if the creators have exhausted all the best ideas. The quantity is there, there is no problem there. Rather, the ideas. It’s not that strange, because it’s not easy to bring something really new every year.
I feel that the quality has moved to the smallest category of 50cc. As if the nostalgia of the DDR has moved to the half-dozen. For several years now, the tuners have been ahead of each other in ideas, sometimes really original. The workshop processing is of top quality.
European Custombike Championship
Photos by Dirk Behlau.
2025 Custombike Show: Bike Photos
Photos by Roman Juriš.
Custombike Show 2025: Event Gallery
Photos by Dirk Behlau.
Follow the Show
Web: www.custombike-show.de
Facebook: www.facebook.com/CustombikeShow/
Instagram: @custombike_show
The unspeakable in pursuit of the unrideable.
Loads of photographs yet not a single caption . . .
Do you really need a caption on 99.99% of those pics?
One of the worst collection of ‘custom’ bikes I’ve ever seen. Goddamn, this was annoying to scroll through.