A huge part of the custom scene is making modern motorcycles look older. Removing plastics, softening angles, fitting things like spoked wheels and simple mufflers.
Take that trend to the logical extreme, and you have a custom like this one. It looks like it?s a century old, but it?s only just been built. It comes from the astoundingly talented Alessandro Rorato?a 39-year-old model-making specialist from Veneto, Italy.

To understand the bike, you often need to understand the man. Alessandro showed an aptitude for building things from a very early age, while plundering materials from his grandfather’s workshop. As a youngster, he built not one but two racing cars?powered by motorcycle engines.
After completing his education at the Italian Design School in Padua, he began working on vintage bicycles and motorcycles, set up Plasma Custom, and moved back into his grandfather?s blacksmith?s workshop.
So you could say it was almost inevitable that he would build a machine like this. He can weld, paint and use a lathe?and also call on modern techniques such as 3D modeling when necessary.
?For this project, I was inspired by the motorbikes and cars of the 1920s,? he says. ?So I made the frame out of steel tubes, and the 24-inch rims were made by welding aluminum tubes to aluminum hubs.?

Alessandro turned the hubs from solid aluminum, and then precision-drilled them to insert the aluminum spokes. ?The rear hub has two ball bearings and a freewheel for starting. For t...