A dead Pulsar, a scrap-market rescue, and a plan to give one bike a different face whenever the mood strikes
By Shivam · 18 Jul 2026
The frame in question
Jaipur — Most motorcycles are one thing forever. You buy a cruiser and it stays a cruiser until the day it dies in somebody’s backyard. I found this arrangement a little boring, so I went and bought a bike that was already dead and skipped to the interesting part.
It’s a Pulsar NS200 frame, rescued from a scrap market on the far side of the city, stripped to its bones and cleaned up until it looked less like a corpse and more like a possibility. Which is the whole point — because I’m not trying to build a bike. I’m trying to build one bike that can be several.
The idea is simple and slightly unreasonable. The frame stays. Everything you actually see — the panels, the tank cover, the cowl, the entire personality of the thing — bolts on and off. A scrambler this week. A café racer when I get tired of that. Maybe something low and sharp after. Same machine underneath, wearing whatever it feels like, the way the rest of us change a jacket.
I’m printing those bodies myself, one prototype at a time, testing whether my ideas survive contact with an actual frame. (They usually don’t, on the first try. That’s what the prototypes are for.) The first face it’s going to wear is a scrambler — a little rugged, a little bad-mannered, exactly the mood I’m in.
There’s a good deal of work left before any of it moves under its own power. But that’s a later problem. For now there’s a clean frame in a workshop that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet — and honestly, neither have I. Which might be why we get along.
