I commuted into Manhattan year-round on a BMW GS, rode rallies through the Shenandoah forests on a KTM 640 Adventure, and ran sand and dirt on the North Carolina coast on an XR650R rally conversion. The FTR is the fire road bike I had been looking for the whole time. There is nothing else quite like it, and giving it the hardware to go farther has become the job.
When Indian released the FTR I saw a great engine, a red trellis chassis that looked like it came out of Bologna, and enough suspension travel to leave the pavement. It sat between the big adventure bikes and the scramblers that look the part and cannot carry a weekend. Indian did not build the parts to take it there, and the aftermarket did not either. So I drew my own.
Twenty years of architecture taught me to sketch my way toward an answer. You draw the thing roughly and the rough drawing shows you what you still have to think about. So I sketch motorcycles I own, motorcycles I want, engines I have had apart, and trucks I want to build. Most of it I do for the pleasure of it, on a Sunday, with a hot cup of coffee.
Every so often a sketch keeps asking questions until it becomes a real one. Then it moves into Fusion, where the questions get answered in millimeters, and then into a folder of cut files, and then onto the bike. That is the whole method, and it is why the parts and the illustrations come from the same place.
The FTR ADV Tower tee is that part illustrated the way a 1980s shop manual would have done it, with the callouts and part numbers left in. Everything else on this page is a machine I have owned, ridden or taken apart on paper for the fun of it. This one I also modeled in Fusion, cut, bent, laid up and bolted to a motorcycle.
The shop is in Asheville. Brackets and frames are 5052 aluminum, laser cut and bent to my drawings, then powder coated. Fairings are carbon fiber, hand laid over molds printed in house, and the clamps are CNC machined. Hardware is stainless, and every fastener a part needs is counted into its box.
I live with the Blue Ridge Parkway, Pisgah, DuPont, and the BDR routes through South Carolina, West Virginia and Virginia as my backyard. Every part goes on my own FTR first and gets ridden and refined for the problems I face. What comes back from those rides is what you can buy.
Every platform gets the same treatment: sketched until the idea holds, modeled in Fusion until the parts agree with each other, and made in small batches here. The Journal is where each one is documented as it happens.
