Ares Design BMW RnineT special
Understated custom RnineT has had a load of hard yards put in
THINK YOUR email inbox is full of crap? Imagine what a Visordown editor’s inbox looks like ffs. Mountebanks, fraudsters, shysters, degenerates, they’re all there. And that’s the nice ones.
But there’s decent stuff as well. Like this rather pretty BMW RnineT custom, from Modena-based firm Ares, better known for its custom specials in the car world.
Like a few customs nowadays, it takes a minute to see where the main work has gone. And here, it’s the swingarm. Yep, the Italian loons have swapped the stock single-sided monoshock arm for a new double-sided swingarm, with twin shocks. Now, that’s a fiddly job on any bike, but on a shaft drive machine, it’s a proper faff. Welding up proper tough metal, very accurate measurements, stress analysis, all that tricky stuff. It’s not just stapling some brown leatherette over your K100 seat.
We assume the Ares folk have made a proper job of it, and it does look pretty sweet. Worth the massive effort? Probably not in our book, but then we are a team of loutish Gixxer boys on the quiet with no taste or style or facial hair to speak of.
The back brake’s been all faired in to look like a drum brake, for unknown reasons. Wheels are by Kineo, which is a good thing, as is the Ohlins supension and Beringer front stoppers. The paint, tank, seat, exhaust are all pleasant enough, and they do get bonus points for managing to fit whitewall TCK80 knobblies (everyone will have these next year Rodney).
The least pleasing thing about this bike though is the pics they sent us. CMYK TIFFs, no less, around 80Mb in size, which we’d sort of accept if they’d been taken on a Hasselblad H6D-50c or even a Canon 5DSR. But they’re from an APS-C Nikon with a kit lens, so it’s a supremely pointless waste of bandwidth sending the buggers out. We’ve converted them into nice sensibly-sized RGB jpgs for you anyway…
Ares is at https://aresdesign.com
