FEATURE
P86
PERE TARRAGÓ
A cast of the MV engine.
The master's shop.
The wheel rims used to be
milled from solid blocks of aluminum on his lathe, which meant
they could only be smooth, not
ridged as on a competition alloy
rim, but for the Benelli and other
racers since then he's been able
to source these from the jewelry
factory, leaving him the fastidious task of boring holes in them,
then lacing them to the drum using some of the 1.5 million wheel
wires he had to buy to make
them affordable.
"Lacing up the wheels is the
worst part of building a bike,"
says Pere. "It's very monotonous."
Next comes the fabrication by
hand of the various other chassis
components, using his detailed
drawings to replicate the original parts by hand – everything
from suspension, controls, instruments, etc. On the production models these are re-created
in greater volume in the jewelry
factory, either by casting or
CNC-machined using a program
compiled by Pere's 35-year-old
son Jordi.
He also takes care of making
the tires, which are formed in a
special kind of liquid rubber that
can be poured into a two-piece
mold which has been CNC machined to produce the shape,
then the tread pattern sparkeroded onto the wall of the mold,
again using a computer program.
Finally, it's the engine's turn,
and here he either carves it out
of solid metal on his precision
lathe – even down to building up
the cylinder finning by making
each individual fin, then gluing it
to the cylinder – or else if it's too
intricate a design to do this, he
makes a plastic model and then
takes a mold off it which then
allows him to replicate it in cast
aluminum.
This may even happen on a
one-off model, but it's the approved technique for building
all the production versions.
Next comes the fuel tank and
bodywork, and here Tarrago will
painstakingly hammer out the
metal shapes of the tank and
mudguards in 8 mm thick brass
plate, before taking a mold off
the finished product for his production bikes, and getting Jordi
to paint them with a special
two-pack material that has been
computer mixed to obtain exactly the right color.
A BMW R32 – and the driveshaft actual
