Besides the Morlaco race bike, I wanted to develop a street variant which was more or less a concept bike. The idea for this Morlaco variant was a bike which communicated with the rider. How?, I hear you ask. I’m always fascinated by technique which is shown to the world like for instance this Suzuki GSX R4 conceptcar from 2001 where the shocks are shown as a styling element.
A motorcycle normally shows a lot of technical details and the idea I had was “why not show the shocks to the rider when he is riding the bike so he visually sees what the suspension is doing” This was the base for the Morlaco concept bike. David developed a chassis for this concept where we used the double link front suspension from the race bike but probably with a CNC milled front fork (from forged aluminium or if possible magnesium) and the famous trellis frame. The first design sketch looked like this
The twin shock concept looked like this:
I must say that this project was largely driven from the aesthetic/design point of view. David, as an engineer, had a lot of doubts about the stress loads the upper frame would indure from the shock movement. Some more sketches to “search” for the design are shown below:
We started to built the prototype but time was getting short and we focused on the race bike to get it done and we put this project on a hold, altough I still like the twin shock concept a lot and I think it could work on a bike like a Yamaha MT01 where two visible Fournales shocks could give such a bike an interesting technical element, not seen on any bike before…
[tags]bottpower,morlaco, motorcycle design, styling,concept, twin shock[/tags]