Source: MotorcyclistOnline.com
The proverbial wheels on creating a custom BMW R 18 Transcontinental got rolling at an impromptu late-night meeting at a bar in the square of Verona, Italy. It was there that custom builder Paul Yaffe was enjoying a drink after a busy day at the Motor Bike Expo when his friend, famed motorcycle photographer Michael Lichter, came strolling in with his buddy Roland Stocker in tow. Even though they didn’t know one another, Yaffe and Stocker hit it off right from the start. Turns out, Stocker is VP of Experimental Design with BMW, and a few months later he reached out to Yaffe to talk about a new BMW R 18 movement he was launching, a big touring segment, and asked if he had any interest in doing a concept with one of them. They loved what Yaffe was doing with big wheel baggers and with Bagger Nation, and as they say, the rest is history.Big-wheeled, blacked-out, brawny, and beautiful: BMW recently unveiled this one-off BMW R 18 Transcontinental bagger at Motor Bike Expo 2024. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)Fast-forward four years to Verona again where Yaffe and BMW just debuted the custom BMW R 18 Transcontinental at the Motor Bike Expo 2024 to an enthusiastic crowd. Blacked-out and brawny, the bold bagger rocks a monstrous front wheel, air ride suspension, burly megaphone exhaust, and a slammed and stretched new look.When BMW was looking for someone to create a concept based on its R 18 Transcontinental, who better than the award-winning leader of Bagger Nation, Paul Yaffe. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)“The unveiling was fantastic,” Yaffe said. “It won a bunch of awards at the Motor Bike Expo, won Best of Show in its category and the Promoter’s Pick award too, which is great. It received lots and lots of European coverage.”Stretched and slammed: Yaffe did a bang-up job of creating a motorcycle that very much looks like a BMW custom bagger and not a typical customized American bagger. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)And although his work has been featured in hundreds of features in motorcycle magazines and on TV, this was Yaffe’s first time working on a BMW.The addition of a huge 26-inch front wheel helped balance out the aesthetics created by the BMW’s hulking horizontally opposed jugs. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)“I’ve spent my whole life riding Harleys,” Yaffe said, “but I don’t have much experience with BMWs, so I told them I’d really like to get to know the bike before I start to customize it. Part of my customizing journey isn’t just chopping up a bike and putting some parts on it. It’s very much experiencing the bike and riding it. The bike asks for things.”Although he has mastered working on Harleys after 35 years in the business, this was Yaffe’s first time tackling a BMW. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)So BMW sent him a couple of motorcycles, one a grand-touring Transcontinental and another more stripped-down version. Yaffe rode the Transcontinental first, embarking on a cross-country trip to Laconia, New Hampshire, from his home in Phoenix, knocking off a bunch of East Coast rides like the Blue Ridge Parkway and Natchez Trace from his bucket list. When he got back, he grabbed the other BMW and rode to Sturgis with his young son onboard, adding another 2,800 miles of seat time.A few select splashes of red help offset this otherwise blacked-out beauty. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)Now familiarized with the nuances and personality of the motorcycle, Yaffe’s vision began to take shape. BMW provided him with a third motorcycle which arrived with a handful of blacked-out factory accessories. Yaffe knew he wanted to do something different in a big wheel, so the first task was reaching out to his buddy Ron Loynds at Metalsport Wheels, who made a custom 26 x 5.5-inch front wheel which he cut from a solid 400-pound plate of billet stock.Yaffe tapped into inspiration from 1950s Mercurys for styling cues on the bike’s back end. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)“He has some very large five-axis machines,” Yaffe said with a chuckle.The custom BMW R 18 Transcontinental rocks a 26 by 5.5-inch front wheel created by Metalsport Wheels. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)Then they had Vee Rubber make a custom 26-inch, 180mm front tire.Yaffe is looking forward to riding this bad boy to Sturgis for the 2024 rally this summer. (Michael Lichter photos courtesy of BMW Motorrad/)“Basically, when it’s mounted it has the same outer diameter as a 30-inch wheel mounted because the tire has a balloon aesthetic,” he added. “The big front wheel helps balance out that huge engine too.”Once he received the wheel, the Bagger Nation team was really able to jump onto the project, measuring geometry, dialing in trail, making triple trees, and cutting the neck. They kicked the front out 9 inches in the neck and 12 inches in the tree.“That’s what set the perfect trail up,” Yaffe said, “because it was very important that the thing handled great. These bikes are wind tunnel designed and their ergonomics are incredible, so we didn’t want to ruin the ride.“We also didn’t want it to look like a Harley with a BMW motor, so we tried to modify everything that was original equipment on the BMW as best we could. We did a good job. We ended up only using six parts on the bike that didn’t start as OEM BMW—the front wheel, fender, front tire, the saddlebags, handlebar, and air suspension.”As a result, this created some unique challenges. As did the BMW’s advanced technology.“The BMW is a very elaborately engineered motorcycle,” he said. “Its electronic systems, its computer-based systems, and sensing systems are very sophisticated.”The motorcycle being such a new platform also presented certain obstacles to overcome.“BMW is rightly very protective of their proprietary stuff. I can’t just order up a service manual and get a service manual like I can with Harley-Davidson. I can go online and go to H-D.net and find out anything I need to know about their models. But I can’t just go on BMW.net because not only do they have a private network for their dealers, they actually have a computer system that’s private to them too. It’s proprietary until you become a BMW dealer. So even if they could give me the codes and they could give me access, I still don’t have the computer,” Yaffe said laughing.“And there’s not a big aftermarket for BMW, at least in this new touring segment, because it’s so new. There’s no pipes, there’s no tuning, there’s no ECM adjustments, there’s nothing really. And when you take the bike apart and put it back together, it throws like 200 codes. Then you have to start analyzing them one at a time. BMW has a machine for that, but I didn’t have access to one. So we had to go in with blindfolds on. Luckily, we beat most everything.”A great example of the motorcycle’s complexity is its fairing.“It doesn’t go together like a front and a rear like a Harley fairing,” he said, “it literally has like 50 pieces and each piece connects to the next piece, so it’s like a puzzle. If you lose a piece in the middle, nothing’s going together.”Using the original fairing, they cut off the front and raked it in a couple of inches because after raking the front end 21 degrees, the headlights were pointing up to the sky. So they opted to rake the fairing too, pulling it forward and repositioning the headlight. They also recreated several pieces on top that go together like a puzzle, reworking them until they had the look they were going for using both original parts and composite structures Yaffe created.The saddlebags also presented plenty of unique challenges.“BMW’s saddlebag system is interesting,” he said, “because what you see when you look at a stock R 18, the shape you see is just a cosmetic skin that sits over the internals of the saddlebag. So there’s a webbed saddlebag storage system that has wire looms through it, and it has a lash system that attaches to it, and the rear speakers for the audio are in there. So we wanted to retain all that stuff and the stock BMW lids.”Yaffe started by buying a set of saddlebags from Tony Schoenwald of Topshop Bagger Products out of Mitchell, South Dakota.“He came up with a saddlebag design that is convex rather than concave,” Yaffe said, “it swoops outward from the top to the bottom, and I thought it really looked like a ‘51 Mercury quarter panel.”They took the Topshop bags and cut them up so cosmetically they look similar, but they’re highly modified.“So the outer bag you visually see bolts on,” Yaffe explained, “and this whole one-piece system that’s the inner bag, the lid, the hinge, the release mechanism, the speaker, and the skin for the top, it all slides into the outer skin, and then it bolts on to create a finished-looking saddlebag that utilizes all of the original BMW stuff.”He then took two rear of the original BMW steel fenders and merged and shaped them together to make a 12-inch stretched rear fender that swoops down and seamlessly integrates into the saddlebags.“So when we did the rear fender and the bags,” Yaffe said, “we left the bags sticking out a little bit kind of like old ‘50s wings and frenched some taillights into them and did some side pipes like you see on the old hot rods. And of course we airbagged the whole thing so it lays down.”Once again, something you’d think is as easy as swapping out pipes was far from simple.“The BMW exhaust systems are super elaborate,” Yaffe said. “First it goes through a catalytic converter, and then they have a servo system. Basically each pipe has a throttle body in it that’s servo-activated through cables and it’s timed with the throttle position, so when you crank the throttle the valves open. It keeps the bike quiet and creates a lot of back pressure under low power needs. Everything’s being analyzed thousands of times a second by the ECM.“So what we decided to do is, we cut the cats out, and then created a perforated core baffle system, kind of like a race baffle system, to put back in the catalytic converter chamber for back pressure but with better flow. We decided to leave the servo system in there because we know we’d code the s—t out of the ECM if we didn’t. Then we created a set of side pipe mufflers that integrate themselves through the saddlebags, these slash cut pipes that sound gnarly.”For the new air ride suspension, the rear air system is a billet monoshock that Yaffe bought from a company in Germany and then adapted to the BMW. On the left side of the bike a plastic box houses a lever down by where the primary would be on a Harley.“You throw this lever and it puts the bike in reverse,” Yaffe explained. “That plastic box doesn’t do much but shroud that lever, so we took the box off and fitted it with a push-on, push-off button and little LED light and a pressure gauge, and then we plumbed that into the air suspension. So it makes an on/off system for the complete air system and it shows pressure so you can find your sweet spots. Then there’s an indicator light.“Basically it controls the air compressor and it controls two nitrous bottles under the saddlebags that hold air for the front and rear suspension, so it always has 165 pounds of air onboard. So when you want to adjust your suspension or just lift up the bike, you just hit the switches and the bike comes right up, it doesn’t just sit there and need a compressor to slowly raise it. Those switches are on the right side, down by the rider’s butt. There’s a filler rail that runs between the saddlebag and rear fender, and we mounted some micro toggle switches there.”Rounding out the hot-rod revisions are a new chin spoiler, Bagger Nation Monkey Bars, shiny gloss black paint laid down by Hector Martinez, and a fresh saddle stitched together by Guy’s Upholstery. Splashes of red on the seat and calipers were added to offset the otherwise jet black beauty.“The end result is a bike that very much looks like a BMW custom bagger,” Yaffe said, “not an American custom bagger, so we’re very happy with that and think BMW was too.“I can’t tell you how many people have already called wanting to buy our BMW kit,” he added laughing.He said others have been requesting a big front wheel for their BMW too. Unfortunately, he has no plans on making a line of aftermarket parts for the model, but he’s not opposed to doing a fully commissioned build. In the meantime, the motorcycle is currently headed back to the United States from Verona for its BMW North America unveiling at Daytona Bike Week in March. You can also catch it this August in Sturgis as Yaffe is hoping to give it an official shakedown on the ride to the rally.
