Dice: Harris Magnum
- Apr 9, 2023
- 2 min read
Dice magazine was the inspiration for Sideburn, but we've waited until issue 99 to stock it. And we've chosen now because the editor's Harris Magnum II is featured, with photos by Sam Christmas. A lot of people ask about that bike, and wonder when Sideburn is going to feature it. Well, we're not, because it's not a Sideburn kind of bike. So this is the next best.
Dice originally launched when the two founders Dean Micetich, and the late Matt Davis, were both living in London, before the pair relocated to the US, where they settle. The mag is imported from the USA, 132 pages and the most influential motorcycle magazine for the last 30 years of more.
The content of Dice 99 is an eclectic mix of old kinds of bikes from choppers (what they're most linked with) to a Dick Mann replica CB750, desert sled & barn find Triumph twins, plus a lot of lifestyle and some pin-up photography.
If foreign readers don't know about Harris, but think they recognise the name it might be because Harris have made all the chassis for Royal Enfield Twin FT that Johnny Lewis races in AFT. They are a famous and well-respected British chassis specialist, who also ran race teams in World Superbike and GP, where they created aluminium beam frames for privateer Yamaha YZR500 two-stroke V4s in the 1990s. The company worked as consultants for Royal Enfield, before being acquired by the Indian company in 2015.
The Magnum range of frame kits were based on the company's extensive world endurance experience, and were a race chassis for the road, based around popular Japanese superbike engines, at a time when Japanese frames were not on a par with their engines. It's a Reynolds 531 chromoly frame, holding a Kawasaki Z1000 MkII. And I love it.
i've always admired the harris magnum frame kits. the article does a great job explaining their endurance racing heritage and why they were such a significant step up from the stock japanese frames of the era. seeing it paired with a z1000 mkii in dice magazine is a perfect fit. it's a nice piece of motorcycle history that doesn't get highlighted enough. AI Image Editor
Brilliant pairing — Dice and Sideburn together is overdue. Side note for the Sideburn team: with 100+ issues, the Stories Directory, Bike Sales, Adventures, Films, and the old Blogspot archive, the magazine has built one of the richest flat-track/custom-culture archives anywhere — but discoverability across all of it is hard. A sortable "Browse by Bike / Frame / Era / Country" landing page would be a serious asset for builders and collectors. I help small specialty publications build that with a copyweb ai — Figma to working filter page in an evening. 99 issues of work deserves the navigation.
The Harris Magnum II on a Z1000 MkII is genuinely the kind of "race chassis for the road" that doesn't exist anymore — Reynolds 531 chromoly was its own era. Glad to see Dice 99 lands on a Sideburn shelf. I help with social for a small UK custom-build account and we use an Banana2 AI image and short-video tool to clean up bike-build photos and create 10-second motion-reveal reels from static shots (workshop lighting kills every detail). The Sam Christmas frame shots especially deserve to be seen that way. Ordering Dice this week.
The Harris Magnum II featured in Dice 99 really caught my eye. It's a race chassis for the road, and I was surprised to learn it's based on a Kawasaki Z1000 MkII Nano Banana Pro
Great insights shared here! I’ve been following Quibohub lately and it’s always full of fresh business and tech perspectives.