I’ve always been fascinated with vintage engineering and this particular example is quite remarkable. Exactly who first came up with the idea of using a wheel’s spokes as suspension seems to be somewhat elusive but the idea itself is quite brilliant. Or it could be utterly terrible. I’m having a hard time imagining how a motorcycle like this would handle.
So far as I am aware there aren’t any companies manufacturing these today, which seems kind of a shame as for one thing, it would allow a person to build a hard-tail motorcycle that doesn’t try to slam your arse through your nose every time you hit a bump.
This brilliant find comes via Frank @ The MotArt – A site that well and truly deserves a spot in any self respecting chap’s bookmark folder.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, 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 millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
The Harley-Davidson VR1000 was a race bike developed in the late-1980s and early-1990s to take on the best in the world. We don’t typically associate the American motorcycle maker with performance machines, but the VR1000 was an exception to this – with a 996cc 60º, liquid-cooled V-twin, quad cams (double overhead per cylinder), four valves per…
This Volkswagen Beetle Outlaw was built by Franz Muhr a little over 10 years ago using an abandoned Baja Bug project car. Muhr wanted to build an extreme interpretation of a Bonneville-bound salt flat racing hot rod from the 1950s. The explosion of hot rod culture in the United States in the mid-20th century was…
The Wishbone is a custom car built by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in 1967, it proved to be a disaster for him and his company, he became so incensed with the car he had it cut up and thrown away – forever removing the car from the face of the Earth. Or so he thought….
The ZOOZ One is an electric BMX bike that’s 20% larger than a standard BMX bicycle, to ensure that it’ll comfortably accommodate adults from 5′ all the way up to 6’5″. The bike’s design is the work of Pete Kelly, an industrial designer and the former head of design at both SkullCandy and Fossil Watches….
The story behind the Kircher Special is both remarkable and familiar, the car was developed and built in the 1950s by an American two-man team who wanted to create a sports racing car that could take on the best coming out of Europe and win. And they succeeded. The Kircher Special started out as many bespoke…
The Lockheed 12 is probably best known as the beautiful art deco airliner waiting for Ingrid Bergman at the end of the Casablanca, it was also used in the 2009 movie Earhart due to its visual similarity to the Lockheed Electra 10 flown by Amelia Earhart in her ill-fated round-the-world flight attempt. The Lockheed 12 is fitted…
