This new BMW Custom by Blitz Motorcycles has been called the “French Bobber” and very much in the style of the team at Blitz – it looks like something that’ll make the purists wail, gnash their teeth and don garments of sackcloth.
Interestingly, the bike started life as 3 separate motorcycles – a BMW R80/7, a R60/2 BMW and a little bit of BSA A7. The engine from the BMW R80/7 was carefully placed into the frame of the BMW R60/2 and the BSA A7 scarified its gas tank.
The frame and suspension from the R60/2 are always quite eye catching, the bikes utilises front and rear swing-arms with oil-pressure shock absorbers giving it an unusual profile and non-traditional handling characteristics.
That R80/7 engine is an 800cc boxer, airhead twin, up 200cc on the 600cc unit that originally came in the R60 models – giving the French Bobber a nice little power boost. The engine breathes through ‘lightly filtered’ velocity stacks and sends the carbon out via twin exhaust pipes with a little muffling to keep the neighbours happy.
If you’d like to take a closer look at the French Bobber or see some of the other work from Blitz Motorcycles you can click here.
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
