It's extremely interesting!
Oh, BikeEXIF, you are always here for us when we need our daily dose of motorcycle porn. You never let us down, and you come through with… uh... beautiful… wait what is that?
The one thing we can always count on is BikeEXIF’s gorgeous photography, and while I used to think they could make any bike look beautiful,
now I am not so sure. Beauty, however, is in the eye of the beholder so
there has to be someone out there who thinks this futuristic angular
thing, aptly described as “arresting,” is beautiful. Maybe.
The
bike was in fact commissioned by BMW Motorrad for a show at the Wheels
and Waves festival: a celebration of classic and custom motorcycles,
skateboarding, and surfing, which has happened for eight years now on the southwest coast of France, in Biarritz.
The custom shop who came up with this bike, Auto Fabrica, is near
London, and most of their custom builds are, fairly traditional cafes
and brat bikes
and lots of them are, for lack of a better term, swoopy. This “Type 18”
is a huge departure from their customary “design language”: it is a
winged, angular, extremely interesting and complicated machine. Some of
the design cues reportedly came from a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. I
totally see it.
They started this build with an R nineT Scrambler,
swapped in the triple trees and forks from an R nine T Roadster, and
wheels and rearsets from an R nine T Racer. The entire suspension has
been further and fully customized. All the wings and flaps you see on
the bike were hand-built and not 3D printed or CNC machined. The
headlight and taillight housing, and turn signal mounts, though, are 3D
printed.
The single design cue that’s carried from the rest of
Auto Fabrica’s builds is the pair of perfectly arched, swooping, almost
noodly exhausts that just flow out from under the bike. Love it or not,
there is no denying the enormous amount of work and skill that went into
this build, and you must admit, it is a true original. I've never seen
anything else like it, have you?
If you do love it, the shop will
be taking orders for this build. Their plan is to make the aluminum
panels interchangeable, so you can specify colors and swap them out if
they get damaged.
COMMENTS