LOW DOWN & SHIFTY
CUSTOM BUILT BY ICON 1000
1978 YAMAHA XS650
She was a mess of a machine
350 lbs of heroin chic executed in cro-moly tube and hand-formed aluminum sheeting. Her tremendously overbuilt Yamaha® 650 parallel twin, now sporting 750cc of displacement and grossly optimistic cams, stood proud within her handcrafted perimeter frame. Dual Mikuni’s vaporized the dwindling petrol supplies as fed to them by a trio of daisy-chained Pingle petcocks. Agreed, it wasn’t a pretty arrangement, but these weren’t pretty times.
IT WAS SUN-BLEACHED EARTH, WITH ITS CRACKED ASPHALT VEINS AND DISINTEGRATING INFRASTRUCTURE
It had taken a brutal toll on most forms of motorized transport. Those that remained were an odd balance of necessity versus availability. Shifty was one of these. Sporting few creature comforts – oblique ergonomics, kidney-rupturing suspension, limited lighting and almost no fuel range – she existed on the fringes of a broken society. Low, Down, & Shifty was nothing this new world needed but everything it deserved.
SHE WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE
She wasn’t fast, not anymore, but she was loud, defiant, and impossible to ignore. In a world that had long since forgotten what glory looked like, she was a reminder that ugly still had a purpose. She wasn’t just a machine; she was proof that a dream could be beaten, battered, and rebuilt into something unstoppable.
