Engineering anything for a motorcycle is a complicated process. The gap between me with a drill and a vice in my shed and producing high quality, thoughtfully designed products is massive. Hopefully this episode of the Pod gives you some insight on the process.
Whenever you sit down with a real engineer, I find I quickly realise just how little I know. This stands for most professions. In some areas these things stand out as a little more obvious. For example I know nothing about building spaceships that can land themselves and I’ll not pretend otherwise. We’ll leave that to the rocket scientists.
With motorcycles, despite being a person who’s schooling was focussed on adult colouring in, I’ve picked up a few things. What catches me off guard about motorcycles is that quite often simple parts take a substantial amount of thought. Something as mundane as a crash bar can be significantly different depending simple materials choices, angles of bends and weld placement.
To some degree, adventure bike protection is quite simple. You can make rudimental parts of out bent pipe and stick them together. However, the bigger your company gets, the more complex the process of both design and manufacturing gets. The options you have for testing, designs and implementation get bigger and better. For me this has always been a fascinating conversation. It’s a conversation of why. A few years back I did an interview with part of the Ducati design team and this follows on from that. Our guest, Jeremy LeBreton, is the CEO and founder of us based after market parts brand AltRider. He’s a hardcore ADV fan, great rider and has the enthusiasm of 10 normal people.
