This BMW R NineT Classic started out as a rendering Roland did based on the 1937 R5 out of a new BMW R9T. He wanted to draw from the classic, beautiful lines of the early BMW machines, which had a very clean, chopped look that is quite tough to duplicate with a new machine. Luckily, the 9T is a pretty simple machine to cut up, and this was the first one the team dissected since the concept 90. The function of the bike, outside the 19″ Hutch front wheel is pretty much as it was in stock trim. A GP suspension was used to rebuild a fully blacked out fork, alongside an Ohlins shock in the back. The suspension on this bike is a few notches above the stock bike even with the slightly larger front wheel. The silhouette echoes the R5, but has sticky rubber and aggressive suspension and brakes.

The sheet metal was all ditched, and the back of the frame was rebuilt to accept stock shock mounting positions, but the seating position was changed and the sub frame was drastically narrowed for a simple solo seat covered by bitchin Rich.

RSD wanted to do crazy frame work around the fenders and had been talking to Sosa Metal Works as he specialized in that type of work. So after almost ten years of doing only in-house fabrication, they brought in Cristian and spent a few days building a frame work that reshaped the machine into the R5 shape.

This proved to be a challenging task for Roland personally because he was used to having his hands on things and that wasn’t the case with this bike when it was gone. So the team got the bike back sometime later and the work was really beautiful. The fuel tank got a bit large, which was carved up to get it back to the classic R5 idea, accompanied by port holes.

When you build a one-off exhaust and intake for custom bikes, it can take some tweaking to get them to run right. Not quite sure why, but Roland says this is the fastest R9T he has ridden to date and straight out of the shop with no tuning. A clean dual exhaust with stainless steel track pipe was put in along with velocity stacks and a lot of RSD parts.