Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/245323
FEATURE P60 BIENVILLE LEGACY V4 PROJECT JIM JACOBY INTERVIEW: MECHANICAL ART Formerly a professor at DePaul University where he taught graduate-level interaction design, and a founding partner at virtual design firm Manifest Digital, BMW R1200GS Adventure-owning Jacoby, 42 is a Southern Californian native transplanted to Chicago, where he founded and today runs ADMCi/American Design and Master Craft Initiative - a corporate educational group providing usercentered design training for business. Jacoby has a clear vision about the Bienville Legacy's future, and the chance to talk to him about this at the Birmingham unveiling of the project revealed his plan. Why commission J.T. Nesbitt to create the Legacy? Our American Design and Master Craft Initiative company is setting out to build a new business model for craftsmanship and education in the American market. We aim to take the production and profit burdens off of mastercraftsmen by giving them the opportunity to design and build without the immediate concern of marketability of a product, pushing the boundaries of what they've been previously able to do. ADMCi is a school for digital craftsmanship. 'Design' is a much broader topic than is understood today. We are all designers, we just work at differing levels of proficiency in the field, and we need an ethic for designing responsibly, so digital designers need to learn from the lance design house, creating a wide range of products from ornate knives and guns to the Magnolia Special, a hand-built 1930s-styled sports car powered by CNG/compressed natural gas which in October 2011 he and driving partner Maxwell Materne drove from New York to Los Angeles in 89 hours to demonstrate its validity, and practicality. But Nesbitt's heart remained in motorcycles – just that he lacked the finance to create the design that had been taking shape in his mind ever since 2005, and consigned to copious drawings, until Jim Jacoby appeared in his studio in April 2012. ethos of master-craftsmen. The Bienville Legacy is our first commission to enable us to learn from a master craftsman, and establish a standard for both preserving craftsmanship in the American market, and taking lessons that can transfer into new markets, especially digital ones. We can learn from studying guys like JT, so our first design commission in the shape of the Legacy combines art, science, raw power and audacious human ambition all in one tightly wound, beautiful package. Was it important that the Legacy should be an allAmerican creation? Yes, but there's a dichotomy here, because JT is the American master craftsman who's responsible for conceiving and making it, but we have carbon fiber from South Africa, brakes from Sweden, and so forth. So this is an American design platform but using the best of materials and components sourced globally. America used to be about doing it all ourselves, even if sometimes not to the highest of levels – it was more important that a component should be American than be of the utmost quality. In today's world, that's no longer good enough, but it's how those components are put together that really matters, and that's where JT exercises his craftsmanship. But powering the bike with a V-four Motus engine built in Michigan for an Alabama company is absolutely crucial – it's the first new production motorcycle engine with more than two cylinders to be made in the USA that I'm aware of for something like 60 years. It's the heart of the project "He was a total stranger, who walked in out of the blue and simply asked me, 'What would you design if you could design anything at all?' " recalls JT. "But because I'd been preparing for the past seven years to have that question asked me, I told him I would design the bike that answered all the questions the Wraith asked, and I pulled out the sketchbook and showed him what I had. So then he said, 'right – let's build it.' But that only happened because I was ready to answer the question - this is a rethinking of the Wraith." Given the go-ahead to translate his concept into metal, Nesbitt needed to source a powerplant for it. For him there could only be one choice - the all-new 1645cc pushrod OHV eight-valve 90-degree V-four engine developed to power a range of motorcycles currently nearing production in Birmingham, Alabama, from the startup Motus company. "For a long time I've wanted to create a true American fourcylinder superbike, meaning a quintessentially American, long wheelbase, supercharged V-four taking the idea of bikes built in the USA in decades long past, but brought up to the present with concepts and materials only available today," says Nesbitt. "That