We haven't been paying much attention to the custom motorcycle world lately, but this jaw-dropping project demanded our attention. It's a Hayabusa engine wrapped in a spectacular titanium frame, swingarm, exhaust, subframe and bodywork.

     So why haven't we seen a full titanium motorcycle before? Well, for starters, it costs a lot more than something like aluminum. It's also a pain in the butt to work with. It's highly reactive at high temperatures, for example, so if you weld it in ambient air, it reacts with oxygen, nitrogen, or even the carbon in steel tools, creating brittle compounds and often wrecking the tools. It tends to stick to cutting tools and ruin those, too.

    In sheet form, it's extremely springy, wanting to return to its original shape, so it takes a lot of extra effort to work into the kinds of complex shapes needed for motorcycle bodywork. But, as briefly outlined in the video below, that's part of the attraction for New Jersey custom builder W. Robert Ransom.

    Ransom took on this all-titanium motorcycle project on behalf of a customer called Mohammed, hoping it would become "a display of artistry and craftsmanship previously not seen in the motorcycle industry."

The beating heart here is a second-generation Suzuki Hayabusa engine, lightly breathed on to take it up around 200 horsepower. Most of the rest is custom, and made from titanium. That includes a wildly curvaceous tubular frame, designed around an entirely new geometry that cants the engine slightly forward and holds it lower in the frame.

The bike's price is surely astronomical; Ransom has already put upwards of 2,000 hours into the titanium bike project. But that's between him and Mohammed, and for all its impracticality and fanciness for its own sake, I have to admit I'm hanging out to see what the final machine looks like. All the better if we see it up on one wheel and getting flogged. Terrific stuff.

Source: W. Robert Ransom