Garage Tinkerers and Home Built Motorcycles
One of the great things about motorcycles is that they are still accessible to change by the everyday rider. Unlike cars, computers and most other consumer products, increases in sophistication and the inclusion of advanced technologies have not separated the owner of a bike from the simple joy of home brewed modification. While for most this means bolting on accessories or performance products, there are those garage inventors who take it upon themselves to design their own, rideable prototype motorcycles.
The garage tinkerer is intrinsic to the motorcycle experience. But so is the one-of-a-kind custom builder. I am not talking about the army of stylish hipsters or leather clad chopper guys who grind an existing frame and build it up using parts from other production bikes. I refer to the type of person that designs a bike from the ground up, fabricating frames, bodies, even sometimes whole engines, from scratch. They are the true holders of the term “custom bike builder”.
Throughout the history of the motorcycle, there have been custom builders. Many built their dream machines simply because it was something fun to do, but others did so because they could not find the bike they wanted so decided to make it for themselves. They saw in the existing ranks of motorcycle gaps in engineering, design, or usage that they felt had to be filled.
A Faster Horse
High on the totem of justifications for building a one-off motorcycle is the search for performance. And chief among the sport motorcycle custom builders was John Britten. Britten's desire to push the performance threshold of large displacement twins drove him to craft, with the help of many others, one of the most remarkable motorcycles of any kind in the modern age.
The Britten V1000 was literally made from scratch. Not content to craft one of the world's only carbon-fibre chassis, Britten chose to design, manufacture, test and assemble almost everything himself. The motor was bespoke, including the pistons, crankshaft, exhaust and a large part of the electronics. The body was hand crafted, the suspension forks hand laid up in carbon fibre and cured in his home build autoclave oven. Britten even made his own wheels!
John Britten's obsessions were weight and component efficiency. He demanded that every part serve these twin goals, which is a pretty common trait among motivated engineering types, but his methodology was entirely unique. Rather than depend on hard calculations, simulation or the deep knowledge of establishment players, he decided largely on his own what to prioritize in the design and development process, mostly on instinct.
The Britten V1000 is without a doubt one of the most amazing motorcycles ever made, partly because it was extremely competitive in a very short time, but mostly because of it's origins. Using the resources available to a middle-aged, full-time employed family man, he and a small team developed a very well resolved design that could race evenly against privateer Ducatis armed with factory race parts.
After much acclaim, Britten manufactured a total of ten examples of his motorcycle, before John died and the company he founded halted. This may seem like a disappointing result, but again, there never was anything at the Britten Motorcycle Company that could be called “factory-like”. These bikes were all hand built to customer order, with engines cast from patterns in the Britten family garage.
There are many other examples of home builds that promised to make motorcycling faster. Ex formula one racer and team owner Dan Gurney built his foot-forward Gator bike because he was convinced that the lower center of gravity made for a better handling bike. Spanish engineer David Sanchez created the BOTTPOWER Morlacco and later a host of bespoke racing and road bikes to satisfy, well, himself and his need for speed.
A Better Mousetrap
After making it faster, the next greatest motivation to make a motorcycle from scratch is to make money. Every now and again, someone comes out of a dimly lit workshop and emerges into the brilliant light of the internet with a prototype motorcycle they promise will revolutionize the world. These types of project are typically born from some technical innovation, such as a patentable method of production, engineering layout, or material application that allows the one-of-a-kind prototype to do something others can't. The prototype is presented to the media with plenty of hyperbole, and the concept offered for sale.
There are almost never any takers. While these projects rarely raise little money, they do raise a lot of eyebrows. From whacky leaning three-wheelers, to the low slung foot-forward designs, bikes made from bonded bamboo fibre and bikes powered by diesel, there is no shortage of genuine innovation in the motorcycle universe, but very few of those radical projects deflected the course of motorcycle history.
Speaking from experience, the chief problem with trying to sell advanced engineering concepts to major motorcycle manufacturers is that they can do whatever you did better and cheaper themselves. No matter how brilliant an invention is, Honda or Yamaha and their army of IP lawyers will find a way to circumvent the newcomer's patent, or else find ten places where it infringes on theirs. Rather than face crushing litigation the newcomers quietly disappears. The other main problem is that often these inventions answer questions that the market didn't ask.
As exciting as they were, many of the first wave of electric motorcycles made little sense to consumers, given the cost and relative performance. Esoteric engine layouts like inverted three cylinder of the Nembo 32, or the pushrod “baby block” V-4 of the Motus also found few admirers, at least those admiring enough to open their wallets.
There are rare happy occasions when the inventor of the better motorcycle stands in the sun. American James Parker succeeded in licensing his patented RADD type center-hub steering front suspension system to Yamaha for the ill-fated GTS-1000; and Australian company Orbital licensed it's two-stroke direct injection technology to Aprilia, Kymco and our own Bombardier.
Ernst Degner, to continue the two-stroke theme, managed to impress the world with his superior disc-valve system so much that Suzuki helped the man orchestrate a defection from communist East Germany to Japan, with the proviso that he help them develop their own version. The scandal of this illegal technology transfer is legendary, and the subject of a great book.
Safety First
One garage theme that consistently emerges among the others is the idea of adding passive safety features to motorcycles. The motorcycle, as it exists, is a thoroughly unsafe vehicle at any speed, lacking as it is in any passive occupant safety features whatsoever. A car's passenger cell, crumple zones, airbags and seat belts are all passive safety technologies. They go to work only once a collision is taking place. While a motorcyclist is able, arguably more than any other motorist, to actively avoid a collision situation by using the superior manoevability of motorcycles, if they should actually participate in a collision the rider is on their own.
Enter the safety motorcycle, a concept that resurfaces about once every ten years when a politician loses a family member to a motorcycle accident and decides to lead a righteous crusade. They almost always are home builds with shaky engineering and even shakier understanding of the physics and biological vulnerability of motorcycle collisions.
One approach is to simply wrap a motorcycle in the loving embrace of a steel safety cage, which is what Hungarian designer László Pere has done. His design, which he calls “the safest motorcycle in the world” places the rider into a car seat with a seatbelt, and surrounds him in heavy gage tubing. It is undoubtedly safer in a crash than a normal motorcycle, but given that his Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign raised just $40 out of $40,000 he wanted for prototyping, the market has spoken.
Other similar efforts applied similar thinking, but with the addition of a third wheel. French engineer Philippe Girardi has spend many years and developed a number of three-wheelers with the aim of reducing motorcycle related road deaths, an admirable pursuit. Starting with the logical reasoning that a leaning three wheeled cycle would eliminate a majority of tip-over and slide related accidents, he created first the Pulsar, which took full advantage of a surrounding roll cage, then more recently the Torga, which replaced the roll cage with a wearable fairing/crumple zone.
Leaving aside for the moment the near complete failure of three wheeled cycles to provide dynamic stability throughout the 120 year history of the motorcycle, the wearable crumple zone may actually be the most significant safety innovation in the last few years. D30 deformable armor, now available in most quality riding suits, is proven to reduce impact injury a lot. But it didn't come from a garage builder, and it certainly didn't ask motorcyclists to wear the front fairing on their chests.
Just Because
By far the best reason to build a home-made motorcycle is personal satisfaction, and this category of garage builder deserves the last word. Unlike the others, these people are not toiling away hundreds of hours in the hopes of building a commercial empire, winning a prestigious race, or change the world. They build because it gives them joy.
One of the most inspirational places to find these projects is on Paul Crowe's website The Kneeslider, where every so often, whenever Paul finds a worthy subject, a home built project gets presented to the world. Even less often comes one that is mind blowing in scope and execution.
Perhaps the best example of this is Aniket Vardhans Royal Enfield Musket. An Indian who came to America with a study visa, he designed and manufactured a V-twin cylinder motor to fit into an Enfield Bullet. When that turned into a more challenging mod than he expected he modified the frame, by which time he was making a new wiring loom and oil system.
The Musket V-twin is not a true one-of-a-kind motorcycle, because it uses a lot of existing Royal Enfield parts and, thanks to the overwhelming reaction to his first bike, he is making batches of them for sale to customers. But the key point is that Vardhan didn't set out to do this, he just wanted an Indian motorcycle with a thumping 1000cc V-twin and no one made it. He hand carved wooden patterns for aluminum engine castings, designed and machined his own crankcase, and figured out the firing pattern, built a bespoke electronic ignition system, and so on. The project took years, and untold hours. Many disappointments and disasters, and a lot of money later, he had one bike that was unlike any other. The broad grin on Verdhan's face, visible in photos and videos, is the sincere proof of why he did it.
The Voices Told Me To Do It
Every once and a while, a true garage build comes that channels the passion people have for motorcycles in a way that big commercial factory efforts cannot. Unlike the committee contrived products presented to the buying public by multinational OEMs, the pure garage build reminds us how deeply personal motorcycling is.
We ride motorcycles because they are personal vehicles. We can and sometimes share them with a passenger, but they are always considered tacked on after-thoughts, like the passenger accommodations themselves. The design, execution and purpose of a motorcycle is singularly focused on satisfying the rider, the person guiding the handlebars.
Similarly, the one-of-a-kind home made motorcycle is a singular vision, one person's idea for a motorcycle. There almost always are many people involved getting it done, but the project grows from the seeds in one person's head. When it is done well, it is inspiring. When incomplete or misguided, embarrassing.
Motivations vary for why persons chose to start so ambitious a project. It makes little sense to design and build a one-of-a-kind motorcycle, given the complexity, enormity of the effort and near impossibility of besting what is already out there. Certainly from a health point of view, both financial and biological, it is foolhardy.
But we continue to do it. I did it, and will likely do it again. The compulsion to do over what already is, but in your own way, is a siren song impossible to ignore. The custom motorcycle is a labour of love, the love of oneself, the love of one's own idea. And as long as there are people in love with their own ideas, there will be garage built motorcycles.