Rough Crafts Faster Tracker and XSR900 Kit

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With three primary pieces, the Faster Tracker body kit bolts on to a Yamaha XSR900 quickly and easily, with no cutting or welding required. (Rough Crafts/)

Winston Yeh is a master builder. His style is high performance and aggressive, always blacked out with mixed textures and subtle details. Having won major awards from the greatest bike shows on nearly every continent, one-off customs rolling out of his Rough Crafts garage are unobtanium for normal people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a bit of Yeh’s trademark style in your garage. With his latest build, a lean and mean Yamaha XSR900, he takes his scalpel to the popular and affordable platform with your bike in mind.

Two types of customs come out of Rough Crafts’ Taiwan workshop, customer bikes and showcase bikes. Customer bikes are commissioned or sold, designed and built for high-dollar clients who want completely unique machines. Showcase bikes may or may not be sold, but are intended to show off the base model’s potential, some skill or technique, or a parts line manufactured by the company. This bike here, as you may have guessed, is the latter.

The carbon fiber tailsection comes with a stainless steel bracket underneath the upholstered seat, but will require the separate purchase of a tail tidy or license plate relocation. (Rough Crafts/)

Starting with a 2021 XSR900, the first priority was to make a stunning custom motorcycle. The second was to inspire home builders and put the pieces used on this bike within their grasp. The carbon front fender, gas tank covers, and seat/tailsection are all made to bolt on to the stock framework with no cutting or welding, sold through Rough Crafts’ website.

“No cutting, no welding. All bolt on is the key,” Yeh says. “By changing the side covers it changed the whole look, the tracker-inspired tailsection/seat attaches with only two bolts.”

The Faster Tracker body kit is available on <a href="https://roughcrafts.com/" target="_blank">roughcrafts.com</a> now. (Rough Crafts/)

Because Öhlins suspension currently only makes a cartridge kit for the MT-09 and XSR900, many builders have been adapting other front ends that modify the bike’s geometry—but that wouldn’t fly here. Yeh developed his own clamp, bracket, and spacer kit to use Öhlins’ FF 521 universal forks while keeping the stock dimensions. In the rear, an Öhlins/Andreani ILX TTX monoshock was used, also maintaining stock geometry.

The license plate bracket and taillight/turn signal assembly were developed with Koso and still work with the stock double seat if riders want to still be able to bring a passenger along. The number plate and headlight should be available soon as well.

Although not listed on the site just yet, the carbon fiber number plate and headlight should be available shortly. (Rough Crafts/)
An Öhlins/Andreani monoshock was installed in the rear to improve performance while maintaining stock geometry. (Rough Crafts/)

With suspension and bodywork dialed, the last step was to fit the XSR with all the high-performance accessories Rough Crafts’ builds are known for. Beringer brakes, Pirelli tires, BST carbon fiber wheels, and SC-Project exhaust were all used, though part of the fun of these kits, Winston expressed, is seeing how customers will mix and match components on their own.

The XSR features a gas tank underneath an outer cover, making it easy for these carbon fiber pieces to bolt right on. (Rough Crafts/)

We’ve seen custom motorcycle kits in the past, but it’s a tricky thing to get just right. The platform needs to be popular and affordable and the kit needs to be stylish without adding too much to the bike’s original price tag. For $2,490 on top of the XSR900′s MSRP of $9,499, customers can get all the carbon fiber bodywork seen here, not something similar, but these exact pieces. Knowing that the build seen here maintains all the stock geometry of the XSR900, adding all the high-performance components and lighter-weight bodywork will make this fun and sporty machine into a real stylish custom.

The Faster Tracker on the streets of Taiwan, where Rough Crafts is located. (Rough Crafts/)

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