Conversation
Before anything is bought or drawn we talk, usually more than once. How you ride, where you ride, how tall you are, what you want the motorcycle to mean. The design brief is written from that, not from a menu.
Twelve months, give or take
To an empty frame
There is a version of this trade where a tank and a seat get bolted to a running motorcycle and photographed at golden hour. This is not that. Every BoMoto build starts at zero, and zero means a bare frame on a stand with absolutely nothing attached to it.
Acquisition
We source the donor globally. Dry stored, honest history, matching numbers where it matters. We have waited months for the right K1100 rather than start with a compromised one, and we always will.
Teardown
The motorcycle is reduced to an empty frame. Roughly fourteen hundred components come off, and every one is cleaned, photographed, catalogued and judged individually against the standard.
Rebuild
Frame blasted and coated, engine rebuilt to new tolerance, bodywork formed by hand, finish laid and cut, then assembly. Nothing that seals, wears or carries load goes back on used.
Stage zero
This is where every commission actually begins.
A bare frame on a stand, blasted back to steel, checked for straightness, repaired where the first twenty five years of its life demanded it, then powder coated. Unglamorous, slow, and the single most important week of the build.
Everything you will eventually look at hangs off the accuracy of this stage. A frame that is two millimetres out will fight you for the next eleven months and the owner will feel it in the first corner without ever knowing why.
The policy
Everything. Not everything that looked worn.
The most common question we get is where the money goes on a build like this. It goes here, into the parts nobody will ever see and every owner will eventually be grateful for.
Replaced as policy
Every o-ring. Every gasket. Every oil seal, dust seal and shaft seal. All bearings, wheel, steering head, gearbox and final drive. Every hose, every clamp, every rubber mount, every fastener that carries load, the full wiring loom, the clutch, the water pump, the fuel pump and every filter in the machine.
Sourced globally
Correct parts are not always convenient parts. We buy from Bavaria, Belgium, northern Italy, Japan and from private collections that never advertise. When the correct casting does not exist any more, we machine it, and the drawing goes into your build record along with everything else.
What you receive
The motorcycle, and the proof.
Every commission is delivered with a bound build record. Photographs of each stage in sequence, the part number and origin of every component fitted, torque figures, paint formulations, the dyno sheet and the name of the person who did each piece of the work.
Dana also shoots the finished motorcycle properly, on location, the way he would shoot any other subject he cared about. Those frames belong to you. Most owners hang one.