If you read my last Blog post about Biker Shirts and Biker Shorts then you’ll know my mind has started to turn towards Spring and the coming biking year.

In that post I mentioned about a planned trip to Spain (that’s already sorted and booked) and that I also needed to make a decision about a week in Scotland with friends.

Well I’ve now made my mind up on that one, and the Scottish trip is in the diary for July.

The Spain trip in September will be with my wife on the Kawasaki Vulcan S and I’ve recently been spending a bit of time in the garage and online trying to figure out what the best luggage options are for that bike. There is an OEM option available from Kawasaki but it isn’t at all cheap and to be honest in my opinion is way overpriced.

To cut a long story short trying to figure out the best luggage option for the bike has left me wondering whether I should look into having some brackets tailor made for the luggage, which in turn led me to search the web for options and ideas.

I think there is now every chance that getting some brackets fabricated may be the best way for me to go..

By happy co-incidence, I was sent a link to look at, for a website called Machining-4U, which was a new one to me, but it actually turns out it’s the website of a company that has been around since 2014.

I suppose it’s one of those sites/services that you wouldn’t think of looking up unless you actually needed something making and unless you knew this sort of online service existed.

Basically, the site works as an online marketplace and matchmaking service.

As the customer you specify online what it is you want making/machining , complete with drawings, measurements, specific requests etc. and your job request is then open for offers from specialist machinists.

If one of them comes back with a price proposal that fits your budget you go ahead and order and your money doesn’t get released to the machinist until you have received your newly machined part and confirm you are content with the quality.

The theory of it all being that because you are able to deal directly with the machinist quoting to do the work or the one actually doing your job, you should be able to get it done at a competitive price.

I’ve not actually used the service myself yet so can’t say how it actually works in practice, but there is every chance I may be doing so once I’ve settled on luggage options for the bike.

A look around the website indicates there is a big enough range of machinists signed up to the service that can pretty much take on anything:  aluminum, steel, stainless steel etc and I’m pretty sure that if I do need to go down the custom made route for brackets I’ll be able to get it sorted via this route.

It did make me think back to a few years ago when I had a Suzuki GSX-R 600 and I had some heel plates cut with the GSX-R logo in them  – bet I could have got them cheaper if a site like this had existed at the time!

Looking through some of the jobs that are on the website made me think it could be ideal if you need purpose made camera mounts, exhaust mounts, heel guards, spacers, bushes, exhaust tubes etc or probably most anything else you can think of.

Any which way I reckon it’s probably worth knowing about the Machining-4U  website in case you are in the market for a purpose made item for your bike.

The words are my own but the pictures I have used are from the Machining-4U website, in this sponsored post