Fat Firestone rubber, black-wrapped headers with scant regard for silencing, scooped cafe seat, wrist-smashing clipons - What more do you need on a bona fide shed-built cafe racer? This no-bull xs400 was sent to us by Nick Cook, a Do The Ton regular, who has put this bike together beautifully, with an eye for scale and balanced proportion that has delivered him a bike well worthy of sharing with the cafe clique. And just to underline that it's not just about bolting on a few parts from the mail order catalogue, here is a reminder of how she looked when Nick first got her back to his man-cave. "The bike started off as a 1981 Yamaha XS400 Special II. From the start I was set on using a Benjies Dolphin Fiberglass tank and tail section. Benjies does not make a kit specifically for the XS400 so I had it made for a Yamaha XS650. When I finally received the parts I found that the triple backbone on the xs400 was going to make this project a lot more work than I anticipated." (Looks like Nick didn't do all the work himself!) "I modified the frame and triple backbone to accept the Benjies tank and it went from there. All electrical was moved under the seat retaining electric start. I custom fabricated the Dual High pipe exhaust which turned out pretty cool albeit pretty loud J I had seen some smaller twin cylinder CC bikes running a two into one carbs and thought that was a unique idea. I also had an issue with the petcock location on the Benjies tank and the stock carbs so I decided to have a 2 into 1 manifold fabbed up. It is running a stock single BS34 Mikuni Carburetor with larger jetting. Rear shocks were upgraded to 14.5” to clear the Café seat and large Vintage Firestone Champion tires. A few other details like custom rearsets, Tachometer delete and adjustable clipon bars were added. Corvette Cyber Gray metallic with black stripes was layed down on the fiberglass parts and the final product is below. Inspired? Good. Here's the original build thread on Do The Ton.