10 make.co
MADE ON EARTH
Taking the long, drawn-out geometry of 1920s-
era German motorcycles as his inspiration,
Hunter Leonard, age 21, is at the starting line of
his custom-chopper endeavors. The Rochester
Institute of Technology mechanical engineering
student, currently sheltering at home in Wayland,
Massachusetts, developed his passion for riding
and repairing bikes during summer visits to
his great uncle Bert, eventually hot rodding his
own motorized bicycle for roaring drives around
his neighborhood. Since gaining access to the
workshop at his college, he’s scratch-built four
motorcycles and fixed and restored many others.
Leonard’s latest creation, the Starrettania, is
based on a 1928 Windhoff, and sports the classic
big fenders and spring-loaded seat, along with
a bolted-in-place subframe with chrome plated
tubes. But where you’d expect to find a 4-cylinder
engine is instead a grid of 16 Nissan Leaf
batteries, along with four bright orange cables
leading to a rear-mounted 40HP hub motor.
To mount the classic and modern pieces
together, Leonard designed a custom frame in
SolidWorks and cut it on a Crossfire CNC plasma
table. “When most bike builders start something
new, they generally start with a frame that came
off of another bike and make their modifications
to that,” he says. “No frame that I know of
could replicate the look I was going for without
requiring a plethora of modifications, to the point
where it would be easier to start with nothing.”
Still a work in progress, Leonard says the bike
should get up to 90mph and has a predicted
range of 80 miles. He’s shown it at Maker Faires,
and aims to log 5,000 trouble-free miles before
embarking on the next build. So far, he’s enjoying
the ride: “There’s no noise, no clutch, no gears,
just twist the throttle and you’re moving. It can
be a very weird sensation to not hear very much
when moving so fast.” —Mike Senese
CIRCUIT BIKE LEONARDMOTORWORKS.COM
Hunter Leonard
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