High on diesel and gasoline

Talk about pleasant surprises, I was walking down the street the last week, actually looking for a place to buy a SIM card, in a part of town I'm never in, and happened upon a shop called CBS: Cempaka Bali Sakti, translated roughly to Magical (a certain type of) Flower Bali.







<-- that's a cempaka









I like the name, because it's cute, and because it's more than a little misleading. CBS is really what the cool kids say when they mean Ubud Custom Cycles.





check out this bad boy!





Ketot was the first person I talked to there, he's a hefty, mongol looking fellow with a sparse Fu Manchu beard. Pande is a scruffy, scrawny guy with a mini pigtail and faint bleached highlights in his hair, and Komang is a tough (and tiny) woman, the owner's cousin, who Ketot and Pande both introduced to me as their boss (which she denies emphatically).

CBS does a lot of standard repairs, but the staff and clients also have a penchant for custom bikes of all kinds: choppers, street bikes, you name it. CBS is the womb and the nest for the coolest motorcycles in town, and may be the only one of its kind in Bali. I've got a bunch of photos of them but no bandwidth to put them on the internet. I might do a flickr thing when I'm back in Singapore.

The mechanics are always laughing and smiling, and I can feel the sheer enjoyment that they have in working on bikes. They also chain smoke, and have little regard for other shop safety. That said, they are really instinctive and talented hack mechanics and are very skilled and quick with tools and techniques, and with improvising tools and techniques.











Pande cutting a piece of metal with great precision, he's really good with the angle grinder. He's also cutting straight through the metal and into the floor (I guess that's just his style)


I spent a whole afternoon talking to them, taking pictures of them at work, and refusing cigarettes.













Kid riding Pande's crazy wasteland chopper bike. The gearshift lever is between his legs, rather than under his left foot where it is on most bikes. That's Komang in the top left.







Grinding down the ends of spokes so they don't poke the tube and cause flat tyres




















After the first guy gets hit in the eye by a fleck of hot metal (don't worry, he's okay), he hands over to Ketot, who wears eye protection and has no problems with shooting sparks across the workshop



Pande welding on the monster bike.







There's never a dull moment here.