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Vanguard Moto Guzzi V8 homage design by Gannet Design Made by Numbnut Motorcycles

The iconic motorcycles of the old days continue to inspire custom builders to create new pieces of art. Vanguard the clothing brand, approached Gannet Design to design a modern homage to the Moto Guzzi V8 of the mid-1950s, and with Numbnut Motorcycles managing the manufacturing process. Numbnut Motorcycles is a collaboration of 9 friends who have been building custom motorcycles in Amsterdam since 2012.

Roderick Seibert from Numbnut commented, “The build process started with Numbnut and Gannet talking together with Vanguard in the middle of 2015. We stripped the donor bike, a 1400cc Moto Guzzi California ‘Eldorado’, of any plastic and all those other not very appealing bits that many modern bikes have nowadays. After that we put on the right tires for the design (the inimitable Firestone Champion Deluxes) and added a pair of YSS twin shocks to get the stance right. We find that this is always the first thing you need to get right; the rest of the bike’s design should always follow the lines that the bike naturally shows in this first, all-important stance set-up."

The next thing was to make the exhausts. “We wanted something that mimicked those short-style pipes from the 1955 bike. We then welded the subframe that holds the dustbin fairing. A lot of mounting and unmounting was required to get the fairing to be perfectly straight on the bike, or to hit ‘the sweet spot’ as we put it.”

A heavily modified fuel tank was fitted. “It’s got knee indents and an overall shape which fits more closely to a racing bike. The seat was shaped afterwards to smoothly follow the line that starts from the top of the tank and moves backward.”

The foot pegs were repositioned farther back by 80 cm, and together with the lower clip-on’s this puts the rider in a racier position.

“The colour on the fairing is dubbed ‘Racing Green,’ and it really brought the whole project to life once it was laid down.”

Source Gannet Design

VANGUARD V8 JEANS | CUSTOM BUILD MOTORCYCLE - THE DRIVE from Vanguard Clothing on Vimeo.