The oddest Yamaha video you’ve seen today

FORGET throbbing beats, moody lighting, sparking angle-grinders and all the other tropes associated with motorcycle promo videos.

Revel instead in six relaxing minutes of Hammond organ while someone assembles a miniature wire wheel from bits of paper and string. It’s the latest development in Yamaha’s Papercraft venture, which lets you build origami-style models of bikes.

We’re not sure if 1970s kid’s TV art show Take Hart was exported to Japan, but they’ve captured much of its placid, slow-paced appeal.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Papercraft, which debuted at the end of 1997 with a model V-Max. Free of charge, you could wait for your dial-up modem to download patterns to print, cut out and assemble - or hurl into a bin in a gluey mess.

Over the next two decades the models became ever more complex, and now Yamaha has outdone itself with a replica of its 1955 YA-1. Print it out at the suggested scale and it theoretically builds up into a 50cm-long, insanely-detailed model.

The video here illustrates a new idea – wire wheels created using string – that features on the special-edition version of the model. For the less-intrepid there’s a ‘standard’ version with paper spokes.

If there’s enough spare time in your life, and you have a saintly level of patience, not to mention superhuman dexterity, then you can download the YA-1 (and all the other Yamaha Papercraft models of the last 20 years) completely free right here.