Some people bake donuts. Others fry them. But if you’re superstar custom bike chef, Noel Muller, you machine, weld, and supercharge them. When Noel found himself with a rare couple of weeks spare in mid-2023, he didn’t sit around scrolling parts catalogues in the office of his Black Cycles Australia workshop. Instead, he swept the floor clean, dragged out a pile of leftover parts from years of builds, and decided to cook up something he’d always wanted to make: a one-off, pure-fun custom that screams attitude from every bronze weld and patina part.
When it comes to the elite tier of custom bike builders, very few on the planet are as prolific as Noel Muller. But from his base at Black Cycles, he doesn’t build cookie-cutter copies; every single bike is totally unique and often like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Using donors that are vintage, classic and modern, he creates old school bobbers, new school cafe cool and everything in between. Supercharged chopper, check, blown and boosted, done it all before, and when customers demand the impossible, the Gold Coast master simply makes it look easy.
So, for his parts bin special, he decided the heart of the beast would be a 1998 Ducati M600, air-cooled engine, reliable, and eager for abuse. Noel set it up on a dedicated jig, then rolled up a pair of 19×3.5-inch solid billet wheels wrapped in chunky Firestones, spaced at a tidy two metres centre-to-centre. From there, things get serious. He’s bent, machined, and tig-welded his way into a scratch-built frame, linking 3mm steel tubing into a skeletal form that nods to vintage board track racers but carries a distinctly modern edge.
The front end? Think more BMX than Bonneville. Noel raided an old springer front end for pivot plates, added custom short springs and mounts, and fabricated the whole thing from 5mm steel pipe. Handlebars are cobbled together from old steel bars and finished with vintage reverse levers, one tugging a 7-inch Triumph drum, the other feeding a hidden hydraulic master cylinder for clutch duty. Every joint is TIG-welded, then overlapped with bronze, creating a finish that glows like old armour under the shop light.
Once the skeleton was set, the patina came out to play. A black chemical patina transforms the bare metal into a deep, burnished brown that looks 80 years old on day one. The stainless twin exhausts are hand-built, laser-etched, and given a custom stainless-specific patina for that dark, matte look that says don’t touch, hot stuff! The vibe isn’t ‘restored classic’, it’s post-apocalyptic art deco, with a serious mechanical edge.
Out back, a 5mm aluminium seat pan with bronze-bushed pivots carries a slab of distressed brown leather that looks like it has seen one too many cross-country races. Above it sits a tank stitched together from a hacked-up eBay café racer shell and a Sportster front end, blended by hand and finished with Noel’s own paintwork, a perfectly imperfect vintage pink and cream, airbrushed with rust, petrol stains, and shadows that fool the eye into thinking it’s been through hell and back.
But the real madness lives in the drivetrain. That humble 600cc Desmo engine now inhales through a custom alloy manifold feeding an AMR300 supercharger, juiced by a new Amal 900 carb and a hand-built velocity stack. The blower spins directly off the crank via a custom-machined snout and five-rib belt, while a faux Lucas magneto houses twin ignition coils, because even faux old-school needs to look deadly real. Add a speed-holed clutch cover, open belts and bits of brass, and you’ve got a motor that looks like it fell out of a WWII fighter plane.
Like all great workshop builds, this one nearly didn’t happen. Started in 2023, it sat dormant for a couple of years while paying jobs took priority. It wasn’t until March that Noel tore it down, finished every detail, and stood back to admire the Frankenstein of his own imagination. And rather than hide it away, Noel’s put it on permanent loan to Mark at Donut Garage in Sydney. It’s the perfect home for a bike this bold; surrounded by other automotive marvels, you can enjoy it up close with a hot coffee and fresh donuts; just don’t expect sprinkles, this is one bad-ass bike.
[ Black Cycles | Donut Garage | Photos by Ramsey Sayed ]