The world’s first big-bore dual sport, the BMW R80G/S, broke cover forty years ago. Born from off-road competition, it soon dominated at the Paris-Dakar rally, before going on to become an icon of adventure motorcycling. But there’s one arena it never really featured in: the Californian desert.
The G/S missed the heyday of the Californian desert racing scene by a decade or two. So it wasn’t even a concept when the Rickman Brothers‘ Triumph- and BSA-powered Metisse scramblers hit the scene. Had the timelines been synced, we may have been treated to a BMW Metisse ? and it would probably have looked something like this.

This vintage boxer scrambler belongs to Jens Kallweit, who lives in the German town of Frechen, on the outskirts of Cologne. Jens is an engineer by trade, but for the past 25 years he’s been doing occasional custom work on the side, for himself and friends. Enamored with the original Rickman Metisse Mk3, Jens had the idea to build the first boxer-powered Metisse. He didn’t use a G/S though; instead, he used an ex-police 1980 BMW R80/7. And he’s turned it into exactly what we imagine a period-correct BMW Metisse would look like.

Jens’ project was also initially far more ambitious than it turned out. He had imported a Rickman Metisse frame and tank of unknown origin from the UK, and had planned to simply use the BMW motor and final drive.
But he wanted the bike to be street legal, and Germany’s uber...