March 4, 2007 This is a story of two men, one a dreamer, and the other a mechanical genius, from opposite sides of the globe joining forces to bring something new and astounding to the streets of America. It starts back in December of 2003, in Sydney, Australia when 3D designer Tim Cameron sketched a cruiser motorcycle on a scrap of paper. A pure flight of fancy, Cameron drew out an aggressively poised, extreme, low- riding design. As an out-of-hours project, using his 3D computer modelling skills, Cameron began to build what he called his ‘dream bike’ in the only place he thought it could ever exist, the self-contained virtual 3D world inside his computer. He spent 2 months ‘building’ the design in 3D down to the bolt heads, in a type of program normally used for Hollywood-type special effects, to create photo-realistic images of the bike so convincing that the average person would be hard pressed to pick them from the real thing. These images attracted the interest of an Australian custom bike magazine, Ozbike, and became the basis for an 8-page cover story. This story in turn generated interest internationally and the images went on to be published by leading motorcycle magazines in 10 different countries around the world. This all by itself was a satisfying result for Cameron, but pales considerably in comparison with what was about to happen next!
Enter engineering genius and bike builder extraordinaire Christian Travert, based in Florida, USA. Christian had been responsible for the engineering and building of the outrageous 200mph ‘Y2K’ jet turbine-powered bike and had happened across pictures of the ‘dream bike’ on the worldwide web. Something struck Christian about the futuristic design and he found himself beginning to apply his considerable engineering talents to some of the problems posed by the design.
After spending two weeks in careful study of the images of the design, in September 2005 Christian sent Cameron a short email entitled ‘Re: Dream bike on the Streets of America’ in which he simply stated: “I can build it”. Cameron knew from Christian’s credentials that this was someone who had already achieved the near impossible by building the Y2K jet bike - still regarded as the fastest production motorcycle in the world. If anyone possessed the talent to bring this outrageous new design alive, it was this man.
After further emails and phone calls, an agreement was formalised and by October 2005 Christian was already emailing digital photos of various components as he created them. Of course Christian was not content to only build ONE example of this motorcycle, but duly commenced plans to start up a factory to accomodate an entire full-blown mass production facility for this machine!
Since the opening of the Travertson Inc factory based in Fort Lauderdale in early 2006, Christian and his team have been racing the clock and working crazy hours on the massive task of making the bike now christened ‘V-Rex’ production-ready. It is one thing to create a one off ‘show bike’, quite another to go into full-blown series production.
Throughout the entire task of actually making the bike ‘for real’, Christian has taken the already extreme design and effectively gone further. New engineering solutions have been formulated so that the bike not only retains the striking looks of the original design, but functions perfectly as a ‘real world’ motorcycle.
Pre-orders for the V-Rex have been rolling in even before the machine had turned a wheel, such has been the excitement and anticipation of what must surely be one of the most mind blowing new motorcycle designs ever seen.
And now, the big news: V-Rex is ready to be seen by the world!
V-Rex will now be seen for the first time on the streets of America at the Daytona Bike Week (March 2-11, 2007),
