Building a bike purely for show has its advantages. There’s no need to worry about whether it runs, steers and stops, and there’s no need for the usual legal accoutrements; as long as it looks pretty, you’re good.
But if you’re Roland Sands, that’s hard to do. With years of experience racing and building bikes, creating something unrideable is simply not in his nature. So when a friend commissioned RSD to build a bike to display in one of his stores, Roland and his team pulled out all the stops.

RSD’s client is a big BMW fan, with quite a few unique cars and bikes in his collection. Naturally, the guys picked a brand new BMW R nineT as the donor.
?He was really into the board track direction,? says Roland, ?so we blended that idea with a bit of café racer flavor to come up with something in between.?
?This bike was a close cousin of the Indian we did a while back that had a similar shaped gas tank. But with the BMW we wanted to keep all the suspension modern and fully functional, where the Indian was a rigid with a girder fork.?
To get the board tracker vibe just right, the team fitted a pair of gorgeous 21? Morris wheels from their own catalog. But swapping out the wheels alone wasn’t going to cut it, so they tore into the frame too.

They started by chopping the neck, raking out the front end to make the big wheel fit with the stock forks. Then they trimmed all superfluous mounts off the frame, and rebuilt the back section...