Something that often happens to industrial designers and engineers: You spend so long staring at a screen and working a mouse, that you itch to make something with your actual hands. So it went for British industrial designer Paul Drake, a/k/a Ziggy-Moto. “Born partly out of the frustration of repetitive client briefs and real-world constraints, I set myself my own brief to build a motorcycle,” Drake told Return of the Café Racers, an online motorcycle magazine.
Drake bought an old BMW R100 on eBay, and started stripping it down and remodeling parts in CAD in his spare time.
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On a family vacation, “I was away from my shed and my tools and desperately wanted to perpetuate the excitement I’d built up,” he says. “I uploaded a couple of the CAD designs I’d done for the BMW,” creating the Instagram account Ziggy-Moto.
After completing his custom rebuild of the BMW…
…Drake moved on to other bikes, uploading CADs and images to the Instagram. Some of these were quite fanciful.
“I’ve used CAD in my day job for years, but I use it in a fluid way, I rarely bother drawing anymore. I use CAD like plasticine and can model stuff pretty quickly. It’s fun and I can sit in front of the TV and just CAD-doodle… that’s where the problem lies! So I CAD-doodle bikes, posting stuff on Instagram as I go and then I’ll stumble upon an idea or a shape and realise I have to make it!”
Drake completed ten bikes in total, but his imagination began to outstrip his available build hours. “I now have too many doodles in the sketchbook… I could never make them all,” he concluded. Nevertheless, he continued uploading CADs, and his Instagram steadily grew in popularity, garnering 325,000 followers.
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Drake’s latest, which has clocked 80,000-plus likes and press attention, is this wild concept for a shape-shifting bike that would allow riders to pick their poison on-the-fly:
Someday, perhaps, the manufacturing technology will be able to fulfill Drake’s vision.
Source: core77