REV’IT! is a European motorcycle gear manufacturer that was founded in 1995, they produce everything from MotoGP level equipment on down to the stuff that people like you and I wear, and every now and then they commission themselves a motorcycle.
Their most recent custom build was developed by Gregor Halenda, Chris Cosentino and Scott Kolb – they were tasked with building the ultimate adventure motorcycle, so the three men set about looking for a suitable donor bike for the project.
They quickly settled on a KTM 950 Super Enduro – already a highly capable motorcycle, and then began the design and fabrication process. The KTM was stripped to its constituent parts and anything that wasn’t going to be used in the new bike was tossed onto the maybe-later pile.
A Christini two-wheel drive kit was ordered with a custom frame and triple tree, the Christini system is a remarkable feat of engineering – it uses only .1 hp and powers the front wheel via a series of chains and a drive shaft.
The front hub is free-wheeling and receives drive at approximately 80% of the speed of the rear wheel, which means that it instantly provides traction when the rear wheel loses grip. Perhaps most interesting is that the whole system only weighs 14 lbs, making it ideally suited to use on enduro and adventure bikes where keeping weight low is a paramount concern.
Once the base chassis was ready the design team began work on the fuel tank, seat pan, seat, exhaust system and body work. The game plan was to create the most capable adventure bike possible, so everything was fabricated by hand with function overruling form.
If you’d like to read the full series of articles on the construction of the bike you can click here to visit REV’IT! – it’s fascinating to see what genuinely talented people can do when given the right tools and a healthy dose of carte blanche.
Below, I’ve added a long gallery of images of the bike and the process of fabricating it, if you’d like to see the men who built it discussing the design and offering insight into their thought process you can click here to view the video.
Articles that Ben 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.
