THE ORBITER - Yamaha XSR700
THE INVITATION
In May of 2016, at the Portuguese event Art & Moto, we asked Luis Figueiredo, Yamaha's marketing director, to try out the new XSR700. We always like to try out new bikes to have a diversified experience and improve our technical knowledge and that bike had just been recently released.
It was a 50 Kms very technical track with a lot of curves and it was really surprising how agile and fast the bike was.
It seemed like a really fun bike to have and perhaps to modify - those were our secret thoughts!
In January 2017 we were surprised by Yamaha Portugal with an invitation to participate on Yard Built, with a XSR700 as a base. Of course we accepted and felt very happy and proud. "Yard Built" is a program we respect a lot, since it was conceived with a great attitude and spirit and gave birth to so many amazing creations by the best builders around. It was great to take part in it - even knowing that it would be very difficult for us to manage the show with all the other projects we had in the pipeline for the next few months. In the end it took us 4 months to build the bike, ready for it's premiere at the Wheels and Waves.
THE PROJECT
From the beginning it was our idea to make something very different from the original motorcycle. It should be either a one pilot only race bike, with a big fairing, or something like a very aggressive off road bike. The last option was the path Yamaha liked the most, so we went for it.
We started to develop the concept further: we wanted a bike to have fun with, since the XSR felt so agile and easy to handle, but we wanted it to be different from the usual dirt bike/scrambler that we thought was becoming too vulgar. We then thought about building a vehicle we could use for road tracks on Mars, or like a moon bike, something to ride unexplored fields and territories. That's were the name "Orbiter" came from. At the end we settled with kind of a mix between a space exploring vehicle and a moon flat track race bike. It makes sense, right?
The color scheme inspiration came from the race tracks but we wanted a monochrome look kind of like a spaceship.
