Renegade Issue 31

36-37 / 100

When Florian Engel and his young team received
the request of “Customshow Emirates” if he was
interested to participate at the international “Biker
Build Off”, he was excited: It was the organizers
target to have two very young team to compete
with each other. It didn’t take Flo long to jump
onto it, yet after a few days he realised what he
really had agreed upon: Not just is a build-off proj-
ect challenging and time consuming to prepare,
but he would represent his young enterprise and
Germany in the United Arab Emirates, at the BBO
Showdown UAE vs. Germany. Aided by Danny
Schramm of Schrammwerk, they skteched a de-
sign which was as unusual as radical – there was
no chance to buy anything like a frame, swingarm
or other major components neccessary to build
this machine! Flo took on the challenge, lifted a
complete Twin Cam motor on his workbench and
started drawing the 1:1 sized plan to the workshop
wall. “Nuts” was probably the mildest comment
he heard on the project, since the task started on
a shoestring budget, with his workshop founded
only in 2011, moving into a new, still to be set up
and painted, location barely weeks before – but
this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for fame and
glory. And to discover uncharted territory in cus-
tomizing. “Full throttle ahead” soon became the
theme – and it was also out of this limited budget,
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Ohio Bike week was my first big show out of my
home area and first stop on the Zombie Apoca-
lypse Tour. As it always seems to go I had a very
short time to pull it all together, I got the final
confirmation on the show only four weeks prior
to the event leaving me very little time to pull
it all together. Not only did I need to put to-
gether all the ads posters and flyers, make
tons of phone calls, email and social media
blasts, I also had to buy a new van!
My old van was having many issues and I just
did not trust it to be road worthy, so I had to buy a
another one, and I wanted to use as many of the parts
as I could from the old van on the new van, so I had to
find another Dodge van around the same year and model. I
found one two weeks before the event and within one week I
cleaned out the new one I just bought, stripped the doors off
my old one and replaced them on the new van along with the
that the decision was made to handcraft
as many parts as possibl . While bend-
ing the first frame tubes, t o wheel
dummys were ade from wooden
discs, simulating a 30-Incher in front
and 20 Inch at the rear.
Rick’s Motorcycles delivered two of
their rare 30-Inch wheel blanks with
the advice to be careful: It would be
very difficult to machine a 3-D design
from next to nothing. Flo wasn’t irritated but
booked a CNC-machine in a friends workshop,
working several nightshifts whe the machin
would not b occupied by production. The result:
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