Inside the Workshop: The Reality of Custom Motorcycle Building

“It’s a really special thing that I’m thankful for, being able to create what I have in my mind and what I feel in my heart for people, and to have them respond to that in such a positive way.”

A garage on the Gold Coast

Tom Gilroy runs a custom and restoration garage on the Gold Coast called Purpose Built Moto. He has been working on bikes for a lot longer than the business has existed, but he puts the real start at 2019. That was the year, as he put it, he started taking it seriously.

It began the way a lot of these things do: in his own garage. He found his first customer quickly. At the time he still had a job. He was an electrician, and had been for a long time. Then the paid jobs started coming in, and he got busier, and busier, and busier.

In the end it wasn’t Tom who made the call. “Eventually my wife told me that I needed to stop doing what I was doing and focus on the bikes full-time,” he told me.

Not a designer

The first thing Tom wanted to make clear is what he isn’t. “I’m not a designer,” he said. “I can’t put pen to paper.”

That doesn’t stop him designing. It just means the designing happens in the making. “When I create stuff, it’s always manual,” he said. Machinery and tools have always been his way in, and for him the artistry and the making are the same thing. You don’t draw it first and then build it. You build it, and that’s where it takes shape.

The story behind the bike

The people who come through Purpose Built Moto aren’t, in Tom’s words, just guys who see a bike and go out and buy one because they want one. They’re generally lifelong riders who have got to know the garage’s work, and they come in because they want something the garage built.

So Tom gets to know them first. Where the bike came from, and what it means to them.

“Sometimes it might have been their granddad’s or their father’s, and it sat in a barn for 50 years.”

He likes hearing that story, because it informs what he does with the motorcycle. “It gives me an insight into what’s important to them, why they love their motorcycle,” he said. “And that, as weird and abstract as it sounds, can completely change the direction of the product that they get.”

It is a nice idea, that a bike can be shaped by something that happened decades before it rolled through the door. Two people could bring in the same machine and leave with very different ones.

Then the work gets practical again. Near the end of a build, Tom gives the bike a little run, makes sure everything is working as it should, and moves on to whatever is next. The one I watched him on would be on the road in a couple of weeks.

Just a modality

For all the hours he spends in here, Tom doesn’t think of himself as someone who could only ever do bikes. “This is just a modality for me to create,” he said. “I think I would be happy enough creating other stuff, but this is the one that I chose.”

What he does have is what he calls an innate desire to make things. Looking back, he can see it earlier in his life. When he was younger and renovating his house, he made furniture for it, just because he could. That was probably the start, he said, of realising that kind of artistry could be ultra fulfilling, and fulfilling precisely because it is hard work.

Days off

I asked what keeps him going when it gets tough. His answer was gratitude. He tries never to take for granted that he gets to come in here every day and do whatever he wants. Even on his days off, this is still what he wants to do.

“You’ve got to remember that’s such a gift,” he said. When he thinks about it, he thinks about how lucky he is to be having a day doing what he loves.

Let the work do the talking

For anyone hoping to do something similar, Tom didn’t offer a business plan. He offered something simpler, and probably harder.

“I think it just has to come from a genuine place of interest and a genuine place of passion,” he said.

“Let the work do the talk.”

If you’re genuinely passionate, genuinely curious, and you really want to do well, and there’s a driver behind it, he reckons you can make it work. People will respond to that. Purpose Built Moto, which started in a home garage with one customer and a wife who could see where it was heading, is his proof.