Steampunk Motorcycle

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the state of the art of custom motorcycle design. I was disparaging of builds that resulted in trailer queens; bikes that would never be ridden, or were so unlikely that riding would be problematic. At the peak of the Orange County Choppers madness, I would look in amazement/amusement at the used bike ads and see 1-2 year old custom built motorcycles with original build costs of $40,000 and up, languish at $12-15,000. There is little market for custom built bikes. They are too much a personal vision, either of the builder or the owner.

But sometimes the art is more than a radicalization or naked-woman art on the tank. On this bike, the builder wanted a functional bike that had aspects of the steampunk genre about it.



I think the builder did a fine job. The bike is hugely custom and yet I can easily imagine throwing a leg over it and going for a ride. I loved the effort to incorporate the oil filter in a highly visible and truly thematic way!



While the seat is probably not something you would want to ride on for 500 miles id does seem like something you could ride on for more than a run to the store for smokes.



And not a naked woman in sight on the bike. Though to be in keeping, any such woman would have needed to be represented in neo-Victorian garb anyway. Better to stick with base metals, eh?