For someone like me living in an apartment and have no garage of sorts, the itch to customize my ride to my taste always takes the back seat. Calling a stock motorcycle my own is only by force and not with contention. But then again, shelling heaps of cash and the downtime of not having the motorcycle with me while it’s in a garage somewhere on the outskirts of the town is usually why I don’t bother much with it.

Coming to the rescue of such folks are these chaps from Istanbul’s Bunker Custom Cycles that have come up with a bespoke bolt-on custom kit for $1000 that will take up just a few hours on a Sunday afternoon to make your ride look like how you’d imagined it to be. Their first such kit is called the “Janus” that bolts on to the Yamaha MT-03 and MT-25 naked streets.

Having easy access to design and fabrication tools, a workplace, and specialized equipment is not a luxury that every motorcycle owner could have. Only people with the passion and a little extra bills could commission a custom builder to work on their machine to be able to call it their own.

For the rest of us, a few builders and motorcycle firms came up with the concept of offering an out-of-the-box solution to retrofit pre-made parts and accessories onto the stock bike. But they did have their flaws. They weren’t simple enough to do it all by yourself and one needed the hands of an expert and a few out-of-the-ordinary tools to get them fitted.

Keeping this in mind, Bunker custom Cycles have created a 17-piece direct bolt-on aluminum body panel kit based on the Yamaha MT-25 platform “that makes custom bike desire a reality for the masses.” Why does this work? Because they care for people like us.

These body panels are fabricated in a way where they can be literally swapped in place of the original factory panels without having to worry about different mounting points on the frame. All one will need is an Allen key and a socket wrench to bolt them onto the original mounting points without requiring any chassis or subframe modification. How cool is that?

The panels are shipped to you without any paint scheme on them that will allow you to further customize your ride with the choice of your mood. You might as well leave them with the raw, exposed aluminum or paint it with your favorite racing numbers and strips. Go wild or not, it will still look like the custom build you envisioned.

The Janus will make the naked streetfighters convert into the 80’s Café Racer graced with 17 precision made aluminum panels that include the fuel tank, seat cowl, side panels, radiator guards, bash plate, front-fender, and tinted windscreen along with a few other bits and bobs. You can also opt only for either the upper body kit or the lower body kit for a few hundred bucks even.

Each of these panels went through a stringent procedure for precision since they weren’t a one-off. The designs were sketched, churned into wooden blocks to shape aluminum, 3d scanned and fabricated meticulously. From design, it took them close to 6 months to come up with these finished products.

Before that, there was this task to select a suitable motorcycle platform that would showcase their exercise. This alone took them almost a year to zero in on, and the result, the Yamaha MT-25. “We chose the Yamaha MT-25 platform not only for its agile and responsive handling, but also for the torquey 2-cylinder engine that red-lines at 14K rpm. The 250cc platform is suitable for riders within a wide range of skill, experience, and physique,” was what they said.

With the “Janus”, the MT-25/03 becomes a lightweight, nimble retro special whose authentic café racer design reflects the true spirit of the motorcycles in the ‘80s era. But make no mistake, it is very much futuristic. This is the perfect blend of ultra-cool retro style with the grunt of a sports racer.

Pre-ordering the kit before June 1, 2018, can save you a few couple hundred bucks because post that, the price for the full kit will jump to $1,725 from $1,000. As aforementioned, you can also pick up just the lower body kit at $550 or just the upper body kit for $900.

One can even pick up a brand new Yamaha MT-03 dressed in Bunker's Janus kit for less than $7,000 which will come with additional goodies apart from the bolt-on panels. It will include EBC discs, DID Pro Street VX2 chain, Pirelli Rosso 2 tires, Yamaha LED signals, R and G tail tidy, Bike Master High Sider 6 inch headlight, LSL Aluminum Headlight Mounts, Biltwell Inc grips, and full Akrapovic Racing exhaust and silencer.

Yamaha also has recently come up with their solution on the bolt on kits. Introduced by Yamaha’s own accessory department, Y’s Gear, these custom kits are sold under the name ‘Authentic.’ They include bolt-on body panels and other accessories meant to give the bikes a retro take with the liveries of the yesteryears. Available to the MT-09, SCR950 and the SR400 naked monsters, the kits range from $820 to $1,100 and are region specific.

Although we know Yamaha does not yet offer the MT-03 in the American markets, Yamaha will definitely be looking at getting on with bringing the competitor for Honda's new entry, the CB300R that will make its way here in a couple of months. Bunker Custom Cycles will soon unleash a range of custom bolt-on kits onto other motorcycle models and brands helping riders create their imagination with less.