Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 3 JANUARY 21, 2014 – the entire Bienville Legacy was built around it, and that makes it an all-American project at the end of the day. Do you plan to put the bike into production? We'll build three bikes, and then assess the reaction to those three before we decide what to do next – we're open to anything. It's crucial that anything that does happen after this remains true to the ethos of the project, which is that it's a bespoke product conceived and executed by an American craftsman, and that's the whole point of creating it. I can't imagine putting it into volume production, which would be self-defeating, but we can use it as the platform for a series of handcrafted motorcycles, individually tailored to the demands of each customer. What's vital is that this should be driving educational opportunities and knowledge skills that can be transferred into other industries – that's most important to us at ADMCi. I believe that master craftsmen in industrial design, architectural design, automotive design, and digital design all share a common ethos, and we're not talking about that anything like sufficiently enough today. Hopefully this project will lead us there, by getting people focusing on how it came to be created, as much as what it is. Okay, but what's happening to the three bikes you're building now? So we have three bikes being made, one of which we'll keep – and two will be for sale. The price will be high. We're going to be looking at upwards of $250,000, precisely because these will be the products of a craftsman, being the case, I couldn't use any other engine than the Motus Vfour, which epitomizes American engineering culture. The friendship and mutual respect I have for Brian Case, dating from the time we worked together at Confederate, also meant it couldn't be anyone else's engine I'd use." Fortunately, the two partners in Motus repaid the confidence by releasing one of its pre-production engines, which has duly formed the basis of the prototype Legacy duly unveiled in public at their City Bike Night street party. In its Bienville Legacy application, the Motus V-four is fitted with a Danish-made Rotrax P61 J.T. Nesbitt and Jim Jacoby. which he has conceived and spent time creating, plus he's using high end materials like carbon fiber, titanium and so on - but no diamonds! JT's spent more than a year and a half of his life creating this, so the price must reflect that. We realize this may seem a ridiculous price for a motorcycle to many, but we'll have to see if there are those who appreciate what we're trying to do here, which is to apply craftsmanship to motorcycle design. Just as artists are rewarded for their skills in creating a true work of art like an oil painting or sculpture, so we're looking at the same thing here. The Bienville Legacy is indeed an item of mechanical art – and I think it's a piece of history, too, in an American industrial design context. supercharger delivering 10psi of boost and chain-driven off the left of the bike, which together with titanium valves, a hotter camshaft and a higher compression ratio, is expected to boost horsepower to close to 300 hp – the prototype street Motus MST-R produces 161 hp at 7800 rpm at the crankshaft. The motor is used as a main load bearing structure in the Legacy, with a vestigial chromemoly tubular spaceframe locating the steering head as well as the mounting bracket for the rear aluminum structure comprising the seat. This bracket also doubles as the mount for the single cen- trally located carbon composite leaf spring that comprises the mothership for the entire suspension system. With a degree of innovation that is breathtaking in its ability to think outside the box of conventional two-wheeled design, Nesbitt has rationalized the Legacy's suspension to the ultimate degree. "The leaf spring is a modern day Paleolithic bow," declares JT. "Our first experience of springing as a human race was by pulling a bow to shoot an arrow." An eccentric adjuster on each end of the blade allows the tension of the spring to be altered, to achieve the same preload ad-

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