Have you ever looked at a Yamaha Tenere 700 and thought, “Nice bike, but it looks too … modern…”?

Maybe you’re just fine with the T7’s 21st-century rally bike looks, but not the good people at Deus Ex Machina. The customization team there got their hands on Yamaha’s middleweight ADV and got busy, customizing the bike as part of Yamaha Motor Europe’s Yard Built program.

The T7’s mechanical bits remain mostly unchanged for this project: Still the same liquid-cooled 689 cc parallel twin. There’s a new titanium muffler; maybe that frees up the engine to make more power, maybe it just makes the bike louder.

There’s also new suspension, with Ohlins shock replacing the stocker, and Andreani forks. The new suspenders supposedly offer more travel than the original shock/forks combo.

Most noticeably, the bodywork gets an extreme makeover. It still has rally bike lines, but the new fibreglass bodywork and tailpiece are inspired by ’80s-era Dakar bikes, not current machines. The paint also harks back to Yamaha’s yellow/black/white racing livery (no cigarette ads, though—that would be the ultimate ’80s homage!).

There’s a new set of offroad-oriented Metzeler Karoo Extreme tires, too, replacing the stock big-blockers. Deus bolted on Acerbis handguards, and added a few other small touches. All in all, a tidy build, and good to see a custom shop make an ADV bike with improved performance over the original model. Too often, the pendulum swings the other way, and we see bikes that are worse-off for their encounter with the “builders.”

For more details on the build, see here.

If you want to learn more about Yamaha’s Yard Built program click here. There’s a big gallery of dealer-built and professionally-built customs, all made with recent Yamaha models as a base. Yamaha actually says it uses this program to derive inspiration for its designers. With that in mind, it would be very cool to see Yamaha make some sort of retro ADV bike with actual performance, similar to its XSR series … but we won’t be holding our breath.

If Yamaha doesn’t want to build this bike, Deus says it might make the body kit available, at least. No doubt pricing will be dear, but that’s the cost of doing business.