By Kate Murphy , RideApart Oh, BikeEXIF , you are always here for us when we need our daily dose of motorcycle porn . You never let us down,...
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