Motorcycle buliders are getting into gear with SolidWorks

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Happy spring from the team at SolidWorks! For many of our customers, spring heralds the beginning of motorcycle season, so we hope you’re out there soaking up the sunshine on the open road.

Following up on the fun at last week's Daytona Beach Bike Week, we announced some pretty cool news today–a customer story from Travertson Motorcycles, which builds luxury custom bikes for riders and collectors around the world.

Luxury motorcycles attract a very specific following; the typical buyers for high-end bikes know what they want, are often sophisticated collectors and understand the meaning of performance. To meet these expectations, the team at Travertson found SolidWorks SimulationXpress to be in particular the most valuable part of SolidWorks Professional, enabling its designers to validate designs and virtually determine effects of force and pressure. This allows Travertson to avoid physical testing on an expensive, long-to-fabricate prototype and dramatically cuts the cost of designing each part.

Travertson isn't the only motorcycle builder out there using SolidWorks though–they're in great company when it comes to cutting edge bike design. Here are a few more companies on our customer list:

  • Orange County Choppers, of reality TV fame, takes advantage of SolidWorks’ surfacing, modeling and CAM capabilities to automate machining and speed time to market by 100 percent.
  • Check out this interview with Vince “Nobody” Doll of Redneck Engineering. Vince loves the ability to create visually before ever beginning a prototype that SolidWorks provides—and he lives to enjoy everything he does.
  • Confederate Motorcycles takes bike design to a whole new level with what The Wall Street Journal calls “face-melting death scooters.” Among Confederate’s designs is a fighter combat bike designed in SolidWorks. Check out Confederate’s full gallery, here.
  • Michael Czysz and the Motoczysz crew are using SolidWorks to design the world's fastest and most advances electric motorcycle. Their bike has won the Isle of Man electric Tourist Trophy race the past two years in a row. We'll be featuring the team on our upcoming Born to Design website. Take a look at the preview video below.

With this tip of the helmet to the people—and designs—leading the custom bike market, we hope you’ll share some of your own custom designs on our Facebook page.

Matthew West

SolidWorks alumnus. I like plate reverb, Rat pedals, Thai curry, New Weird fiction, my kids, Vespas, Jazzmasters, my wife & Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not necessarily in that order.