Macau Custom Garage – a meeting point for bike enthusiasts

The Macau Custom Garage (MCG) is a motorcycle garage created in 1997 when the owner of the project Sérgio Lacerda, was looking for the opportunity to race motorcycles in Macau.

“I wanted to race and I needed a place to build my own bike. So I found a shop, a place I could afford, rented it and started doing it,” Lacerda told the Times.

Eventually, garages of this type (located in several places across the Peninsula and Taipa over the years) have become meeting-points where friends gather to chat, have a beer and eventually fix something on their bikes. “There are people that come here often and they have no intentions of even changing one single part on their bikes and that’s not a problem,” Lacerda said with a smile.
Run by a group of friends who share a love for bikes and customizing them, the MCG has been located in the Barra area near Ponte 5A since April 2017, continuing the very same spirit of its creation 20 years ago; to be a meeting-point for “nice people that like bikes.”

Besides the normal repair work, found in any other workshop, one of the specialties of MCG is motorcycle transformation.

As Lacerda explained, “People have old and ugly motorcycles and they don’t want to buy a new one. Many of them are also attracted [to] the idea of having something different [from all the others on the road] and want something unique.”

“Our job is to understand what the owner likes and try to develop a project around it that is ‘doable,’ sometimes people have ‘wacky’ ideas that are technically possible to do or that aren’t allowed in streets,” he noted.

Over the past 20 years, according to Lacerda, the MCG have built around 25 of these custom motorcycles, but there are limits imposed by the garage itself: “I don’t want to do more than two per year. This is a work that requires a lot of time, thinking, planning, testing, re-thinking and a lot of attention to detail. We don’t work with deadlines also.”

Usually three people in the garage, including the owner, work on the bikes, but there are parts that are outsourced, like graphics painting and particularly difficult welding jobs due to the nature of the materials involved.

As Lacerda explained, most customers are aged between 30 to 40 years old and most of the bikes transformed are “small bikes,” usually in the range of 125cc to 250cc engines.

From the approximately 25 custom jobs the garage has done, Lacerda said he particularly liked about 10, especially those in which the outcome is completely different from the original.

As for the hardest project, he admitted it was a “big bike,” an Intruder 1400 chopper that took seven years to complete.

Another of the projects that Lacerda said he liked was of a small 90cc engine two-stroke engine motorcycle; “it was a very old motorcycle that previously had belonged to the Post Office Services. It was sold in an auction by the government and eventually ended up here. What we tried to do in this case was to restore it to its original outlook even before […] being transformed for the use of the Post Office service.”

Lacerda explained that in the final process, all motorcycles have to pass through a special inspection by the Transport Bureau in order to guarantee that they are compliant with the laws and safety rules to ride on the public roads and streets but he said that this has not been too much hassle: “If we just keep it tidy, and follow the rules, there is no problem.”