My advice to you is to stop reading and check out each and every Jack Cofano photo in the gallery and take the time to drink in the design and detailing Max put into this build he calls The Musket. This bike is nothing short of sensational on all counts from conception to completion. By my guess, there’s nothing here you’ve seen before done quite like this even though the basic motorcycle elements of engine, wheels and a frame remain the same as any other custom motorcycle. While you’re at it, check out the last Barnett’s Magazine Online’s feature bike by Hazan Motorworks, a supercharged Ironhead that’ll do the mesmerizing staring thing to you all over again. True art is a lot more than the assemblage of pieces even if each and every one of those pieces is a piece of art. In my opinion, Max Hazan is more metal sculptor than motorcycle builder and if his latest build doesn’t make you feel that way, maybe you should stick to painting mountains with the late Bob Ross. He was a nice guy, but not a hell of an artist. Me? I like hell-of- an-artist guys.

 

   A lot of times builds can be made around a favorite part like a pistol grip shifter out of a Hemi ‘Cuda or a rusted-out headlight off a ’38 Buick and that’s cool stuff, but Max kinda upped the ante with something extremely rare and extremely different. It’s a bit more than a single item and actually a made-up conglomeration of a buncha engine parts from an Indian-made modernized version of the ancient British Royal Enfield 500cc single-cylinder motorcycle. The 1000cc thoughtfully-bastardized 59-degree V-twin engine imagined and realized by Aniket Vardhan from the pair of Royal Enfield 500cc cylinders and heads mounted on an entirely new crankcase and internals is nothing to sneeze at either. Aniket calls the end result The Musket V-twin from the fact that Royal Enfield in a previous life built muskets and other small arms for the British military starting way back in 1816 and so it’s no big surprise where this bike, The Musket, got its name. It’s also not a big surprise to me that one dreamer caught another dreamer’s attention. It goes with the territory one would assume.

 

   Now I’m not going to bore you with all the details of what it took for Aniket Vardhan to make a running and fully developed, potentially reliable version of an engine that never existed, but it was a lot of trial and error. I know this as I’ve been following his extensive online development of this engine from a much smaller version to the latest 1000cc V-twin over the years. This is usually something reserved for a team of engineers and banks of computers, not something coming from nothing but the imagination, skill, hard work and extreme patience and dedication of one man. Obviously Max recognized the art of the kick-only engine and built a bike around it. That didn’t stop him from reworking and beautifying parts like the dual cosmetically reworked Amal Mk.1 carbs with hard lines going into the carbs instead of rubber coated cables or the pair of tall, yet elegant clutch and walnut wood topped hand shifter levers working in tandem through lovely linkages that disappear into the bowels of the engine. Or the sweep of the headers that’s got just the right hint of Vincent. All nice stuff that could stand on its own artistic merit if need be. 

 

   Ever the artist, Max built The Musket from a full-sized drawing mounted on the wall of this studio, er, shop. The scale of 1:1 certainly puts things into perspective in a way no napkin sketch could ever do although just doing a 1:1 sketch would be enough for me to call it a day and go on with whatever else I do in life. Obviously Max isn’t afflicted with lazy-glanditis like I am and got to work forming a frame out of Kate Moss-thin steel tubing that can’t be more than an inch in diameter by my eyeball. To put it in perspective, it’s like it was made from the same small diameter handlebar tubing you see on metric bikes. The smooth lines, whether straight or curved, look very relaxed in their daintiness and really strip this frame down to a line drawing in metal. It’s almost not there. The warm glow of the nickel finish covering the steel tubing softens the perimeter boundaries even just a bit more and leaves the hybrid of an engine almost floating in air.  

 

   Speaking of Max Hazan fabricated pieces doing what appears the impossible is that impossibly irresistible dainty front end that exudes as much love put into it as hard work. This inspiring bit of apparently hardware-less suspension jewelry looks like it should never work, but you know it does and probably does it surprisingly extremely well. The action of this springer fork is the opposite of a regular springer where movement works on spring compression. Max claims his spring mechanism in tension approach allowed him to use this baby thin steel for fork legs and linkages. He even fabricated the cleaner-than-clean twin bronze-encased spring/shocks that look like no other I’ve ever see and they’re simplistically gorgeous.

 

    Fooling the eye on all of this frame and fork construction is Max’s unusual choice of rolling stock and, no, it’s not the use of classic laced wheels as that’s nothing unusual, but the combo of rim size and tire choice that’s straight off a car from the ‘60s. The car-size 15-inch black rim is laced in a traditional motorcycle manner and sports replica BF Goodrich Silvertown tires that might have been on your Grampy’s 1962 Oldsmobile 88. The super tall black sidewalls with an aspect ratio best measured with a 12-inch ruler for accuracy blend right into the black rim for even more noir drama and don’t loose a bit of their visual height because of their extremely square tread that looks like a product of a T-square.

 

    I can only assume those square edges give you more ground clearance if you get up on edge in a corner while being extremely squirrelly to ride with about eight-ponds of pressure in them to help any attempt at cornering by collapsing the corner a bit. But just like the apparent lack of braking on the wheels which is actually controlled by a fabbed trans brake doing the stopping duties, I wouldn’t worry too much as the only real movement this piece of art will probably do are non-running laps around some wealthy connoisseur’s Great Room in a house with at least 15 bathrooms. And, maybe the occasional parade lap under power around the manicured grounds at the owner’s 50^th birthday party. And for once, that’s okay by me. This bike might be best viewed with a glass of champagne and freshly-pressed dress clothes on a beautiful summer’s day after a nice sail on the yacht.

 

   Max instinctively knows how to edit his work and pieces like the hand-hammered aluminum fuel tank (which incidentally holds a tiny battery inside) and fenders in all their simple metal glory gleam back the time and effort put into them. Nothing fancy, but nothing boring, just simple artistic honesty of what these pieces are and how best to showcase and integrate them into the final product. The semi-exposed duplex chain primary might not be the best thing for a run in bad weather, but who cares? It’s all a bit of mischievous mechanical fun going on there just spinning crude stuff around behind a nice bit of casting with Hazan’s tasteful logo lightly engraved into it. Kind of like one of those cut-away V8 engines Detroit manufacturers so loved to display to an adoring public. I often wonder if the general public all thought the engines in their cars were painted red, yellow, blue and green inside like those cut-aways.

 

   Possibly my favorite piece on this whole build is not the unusual engine, not the striking frame, or the hard-to-get-my-mind-around fork, or the perfecto bodywork, but the walnut seat that reminds me of a fancy knife handle and the ridiculously cool suspension it rides on. The seat is so perfectly sculpted and shaped it looks like it might just be comfortable as well as astoundingly beautiful and I can’t even believe I’m saying that as the last time I checked, wood is relatively hard even the soft woods. Never mind that bit of unusual beauty, though, as Max’s gorgeously stunning complicated system of links and cranks or whatever underneath that work another one of his brass capped spring/shocks that I couldn’t stop admiring and jealously envying. Hey, it might be disappointing to hear someone go off about your sprung saddle when there’s so much more going on, but I just love the thought and good taste that went into something that’s not immediately apparent with all the other goings on. Sorry Max, but you got my undivided attention at your interpretation of what you think a seat might be.

 

   What Max has built is one of those rare bikes where paint was not an option to bring it to life, but good design reigns supreme. No, it is not something you’d probably throw luggage and camping gear on and head out for parts unknown. It was never Max’s intention to build it to go from one state boundary to another, but to break the boundaries of what a piece of art cleverly disguised as a beautiful motorcycle could be if you throw out the practical limitations of motorcycles most of us own and love and replace them with a why not? or what if? instead. Like any true artist he looked, he saw, and he built his idea of a beautiful piece of art based on something we all love for its beauty, a motorcycle, and we’re all the luckier for it. Maybe the bit I wrote about knowing both art and porn when I see it rings even more true than I think. To me at least, this is pure motorcycle porn at its finest and I can’t stop gawking no matter how hard I try and turn away.

 

For more info on Hazan Motorworks, check out http://hazanmotorworks.com/ or Facebook. Even better, there’s a lot of great Hazan videos on YouTube that are worth your time to check out.