Matthias Ebenhoch, a German engineer looking for an escape from his desk job, picked up a 1978 Honda CB750F1 Super Sport with a straightforward plan: spend three years and €10,000 to build a clean café racer.
Instead, between career shifts, relocations, and renovating a century-old house, the project stretched into a grueling nine-year, 1,300-hour obsession.
A Cool Custom Honda CB750F1
Matthias even nicknamed the bike “Damned Bitch — Two steps forward, one step back” due to an endless string of setbacks, which included a failed home-made spray booth, a custom lithium battery that caught fire inside his apartment, and a gas tank that rusted completely through after he painstakingly restored it in his own bathtub.
The result of all that suffering, officially dubbed “MAEB #1,” is a stunning, ultra-clean café racer that somehow managed to pass Germany’s notoriously strict TUV road-legal inspections. Matthias completely transformed the bike’s stance by swapping on a modern Suzuki GSX-R front end, lacing up a custom set of spoked wheels, and mounting adjustable Öhlins rear shocks beneath a hand-fabricated fiberglass tail cowl.
The rebuilt 750cc inline-four is finished in a sharp matte black, paired with a custom-made stainless steel oil tank and a cutting-edge Motogadget digital electrical system that required 17 different wiring schematics to perfect.
It puts out a healthy 65 horsepower and looks incredibly aggressive, even if Matthias freely admits that the rock-hard seat and low clip-on bars make it an absolute nightmare to ride for more than a few miles.
Sources: BikeBound, Matthias Ebenhoch
