Matt Gilbert

I am a New York transplant to Florida. I’ve been in and out of motorcycling since I was twelve. I bought my first street-bike at eighteen and haven’t looked back.
I first got involved with streetfighters back in the mid-nineties by modifying my H-D Sportster for a more performance-oriented look and feel. I got fully involved with streetfightering when I purchased my current bike, a 2000 Yamaha R6, in November of 2008.

I am a full-time rider. I don’t even own a car. That’s one of the benefits to living in Florida. I earn my living as an Apple-Certified Mac Guru. I perform service and repairs, as well as tutoring for Macintosh computers. What can I say, I love Macs! If there is a type of Macintosh computer system I have worked on it. I work as a System Administrator for small to medium sized business, right on down to a tutor for an individual with a single laptop. I do it all.

More about me and my streetfighter

I earn my living as a computer technician. I’ve always had a gift with computers, and have worked in various positions in the technology industry for eight years now. Motorcycles are my favorite hobby and pastime. I enjoy everything about bikes, from maintenance and wrenching, to modifying and customizing – and of course riding the heck out of them.

I got my start with motorcycling in the cruiser & chopper scene. My first (legal) streetbike was a Suzuki Intruder which I picked up when i graduated High School. I didn’t do much in the way of customizing to that bike. I just changed the bars, pipe, and seat. I rode that for one summer, then sold it to buy a second-hand sportster. That was when the customizing and modifying bug bit me. The sportster went through many changes and styles, but I was never very satisfied with the handling and performance of Harley-Davidsons. In the summer of 1994, I was going through some major changes in my life and riding took a sideline. I ended up eventually selling my H-D in 1999 and didn’t ride at all for nearly a decade.

After a long hiatus from the motorcycle world I started to get the itch once again. I was living on the East-End of Long Island, New York when I made the decision to succumb and get a new bike, but I was weeks away from a move to Southwest Florida so I decided to wait until I had settled in Florida first. I knew I didn’t want another H-D, and that a sportbike would be the way to go this time. I initially was looking for a stock bike, but everything that I was seeing that was in decent condition was out of my price-range. Then by a stroke of luck I found my bike. It was a stock 2000 Yamaha R6 that had already had the plastics and headlight removed. It wasn’t much to look at, but the price was right. So I flew up to Georgia, where the bike was, paid, and transfered paperwork, and rode the bike back down to Florida.

The bike stayed as it was for about two weeks. Ever since my harley days, I can’t own a bike and not customize it to make it my own. I liked the bike as it was without the plastics on it, but it had an ‘unfinished’ look to it that bugged the heck out of me. I started making it my own by painting the plastics that were on there. I went with a gunmetal grey metallic color in spray-can form to eliminate the stock original blue & white color scheme. That still didn’t get me where I wanted though. So I began searching the web for parts and accessories I might be able to get to try and get the bike looking more finished looking. As I was searching for a set of better headlights, I came across the holy-grail of sportbike customizing - customfighters.com. Custom Fighters is an online community dedicated to streetfighter motorcycles. Now by the time I found Custom Fighters, I had seen some pictures of streetfighters before, but had never really known much about them. I figured up until then that streetfighters were mostly a European trend, and didn’t really have a following or community here in the states. Boy was I wrong! Well the community there was really what pushed me to do as much to my R6 as I did. Between seeing all of these other hot streetfighters, and the great encouragement and support I received from the other members, I decided to go all-out and really customize my bike.

After asking lots of questions, and looking at lots of pictures, I decided I wanted to make my R6 into a bobber style streetfighter where the only tail that’s left is what’s needed to support the seat. I had always loved the bobber look on choppers, so I was hopeful that I could get a similar aggressive look with my bike. I was most inspired by two bikes in particular – the bobber R1 by Jason Rodman at R1 Engineering, and “Bladerod” by Mark Boxer. Those two bikes looked so aggressive and unique to me that I felt I just had to try a similar approach without duplicating what they had done.

So in my enthusiasm, the very-first thing I did was grab a saws-all and hack off the rear half of my tail. I chopped it off right behind the rider’s seat, and bolted some tail lights to it.
It looked like crap. It had the silhouette I was looking for but with the subframe the way it was, it just looked like a hack-job and nothing more.
That was when I realized I had to really put some time and effort into the design first. I made a complete mock-up in Photoshop on my computer and tweaked it until I was happy with every last detail. With the mock-up in hand and the chopped-up subframe of my tail, I found a local welder who could help me fabricate my subframe the way I wanted it. Once the subframe was all welded I took it home and began closing it up with sheet-aluminum. I had developed a style where I could drop all of the sheet metal out of the frame if I had to but it would seal-up very tight and clean when all bolted together.

For the rest of the tail, I drew from my background with harleys. I decided to use a flexible strip of LEDs for my tail light. I wanted something that was minimal and would blend-in with the rest of the details of the tail. I ended-up integrating the turn-signals into the same strip as the tail/brake light so that I had an 80-LED strip in the middle, and two 20-LED strips on either side for the turns. Once I figured-out where all the wiring and electric was going to fit in my new tail, I pulled everything back apart for paint and finishing. Talk about twenty-pounds of stuff in a ten-pound bag... I was amazed all of the electrical bits could actually fit in such a smaller area.

While building my tail, I decided the rest of the bike needed some loving also. I polished the frame and forks, but left them with a soft shine, rather than a full chrome-like shine. I knew I had to also clean-up the front end of the bike so I had some work to do up there as well. I replaced the stock gauges with a Vapor mini digital gauge by Trail Tech, and also picked-up a set of HID lights that had self-contained ballasts – also from Trail Tech. I made some clean minimal brackets for the lights and gauge to keep everything as clean as possible. Then I cut some plastic tubing to connect with my airbox to restore the ram-air functionality and also hide some of the openness of the openings in the neck of my frame. And finally, when all was said and done I arrived at the finished product as you see it now.

All fabrication and modifications were done by myself in my garage with a $80 set of hand tools, a drill, a dremel tool, and a borrowed saws-all. The only work I didn’t do was the welding on the sub-frame.