Built to the frame. Then built to the owner.
We take a 1994 to 1996 BMW K1100 down to an empty frame, and we put it back together as one motorcycle for one person. Every o-ring. Every gasket. Every decision.
Four machines. Four completely different arguments.
Each of these is a finished design, drawn and specified and ready to be commissioned. Every one is a 1994 to 1996 BMW K1100 taken to a bare frame. Take one exactly as drawn, or use it as the opening line of your own.
Nachtblau
The dial piece. Eleven coats of black over hand formed steel, cut and polished by hand, broken by a single hand laid line of ceramic blue.
Meridian
Bare hand formed aluminium, left exactly as the wheel and the hammer left it. The bravest finish we offer, because paint hides nothing here.
Trikolor
Pearl white, a hand laid Motorsport band, a yellow lens and blue rims. A period livery executed to a standard the period could not reach.
Zinnober
Candy amber laid over a black ground, tan hide stitched by hand, brushed gold wheels and polished stainless. The one that stops a room.
A motorcycle should be worth the miles you put on it.Dana Bowden, Operating Partner
Dana Bowden spent twenty years learning how to see.
Before there was a workshop there was a camera, and a career built on going further than the assignment asked for. Sleeping in the truck to be on the ridge before the light. Waiting four days in a fishing shed for a face to relax. Flying to a place with one frame in mind and coming home with the one nobody else thought to take.
That is not a romantic story about photography. It is the working method that now goes into every motorcycle that leaves this shop. The same refusal to accept the easy version. The same willingness to start the panel again.
The full story →To an empty frame. There is no shortcut worth taking.
A BoMoto build is not a set of parts hung on a running motorcycle. The donor is reduced to a bare powder coated frame, and roughly fourteen hundred individual components are cleaned, catalogued, replaced or remade before a single one goes back on.
Every seal is new. Every one.
O-rings, gaskets, bearings, bushings, hoses and fasteners are replaced as a matter of policy, not as a matter of inspection. It is the single most expensive habit we have and the one we will never negotiate on.
Parts come from wherever the right part actually is. Bavaria, Belgium, northern Italy, a collector's estate in Osaka. We have waited nine weeks for one correct casting rather than fit a serviceable substitute.
Read the process →
Pre 1988 airheads, returned to correct.
The cafe racers are where we express. The airheads are where we behave. Restoration work is governed by the factory record, not by taste, and we hold ourselves to the finish level the factory intended rather than the finish level the market accepts.
Slash 5 through the final Monolever machines. Concours correct, or sympathetically preserved, depending entirely on what the motorcycle deserves.
The airhead programme →