Good, cheap and nice. These were our premises for the Morlaco bodywork design. To build a nice and efficient bodywork involves a lot of time and resources that we don’t have, so the most practical solution was to copy something or start from something already fabricated. We decided to use parts from other motorbikes (bodywork, fueltank cover, tail and keel) and modify it to change it’s aspect in order to achieve a motorbike with it’s own personality.
Hugo van Waaijen chose the parts. The trick was to choose parts from different motorbikes, but keeping in mind that they must work all together. It is a complex subject because we were limited to those parts that could fit on the Morlaco.
Hugo designed also the way in which each part should be modified to make everything work together and also to avoid that anybody could realize where each part came from (hey! this is from a kawa ZXR!!). He achieved the objective with very few and simple modifications, this was great because to modify the parts costed less time and money.
To create good surfaces, with a good simmetry, etc is a difficult job that requires experience. Hugo knew Michael Uhlarik, designer and proffesional modeler that has been working in great projects like the Yamaha MT03 or even the Yamaha M1. We talked with Michael and we arrived to an arrangement with him, so he was the one who modified the parts. He also made this cool sketch.
This is how the bike looked once the modelling work was finished. You can see big size images in our Flickr gallery.
One of our main aims was to use a narrow bodywork, with a small front area, in this way we took profit of our narrow chassis design.
Here you can see the fuel tank cover.
By the way, is there anybody who can guess from which bikes are the parts we used for the bodywork? 🙂
[tags]bottpower, morlaco, bodywork, design, construction[/tags]