The joy of
Mac’s foundations
Between us, we’ve owned and ridden just about everything bar a top-fuel drag bike (Gaffer One’s probably daft enough to throw his leg over one but his track-record of coming back in one piece isn’t great) so it seemed timely to design what we wanted next but couldn’t easily find. Here’s the brief we set ourselves ;
- Exploit a torquey single in a lightweight chassis
- Harley presence, flat-tracker manners, Ducati handling
- Nothing surplus-to-requirements
- Value the grey hairs of time-served craftsmen and proper engineers
- Simple-to-maintain
The Bikes
Inspired by our participation in the MotoGiro d’Italia in 2008, seeing lots of small capacity motorcycles working at their optimum, we started to think about a lightweight single, using Buell’s 500cc ‘Blast’ engine.
In spite of the interest our first motorbike garnered, the Buell-engined ‘Blast’, was abandoned by the big cheeses at Harley so we had to go back to the drawing-board and rethink the design, with a new engine.