Last European trip we did, we were pretty naive. Truth is, if it wasn't for kindness of strangers we would not of gotten very far at all. In actual fact our gearbox broke early on in Estonia. But that's another story.
This time we're paying a custom bike builder by the name of Viktor to build our bikes for us. He is doing this at cost price all because he is a biker himself, he understand that were not some ritch film starts with unlimited budget and a total lack of imagination.
Viktor used to work for the IMZ factory in Irbit at the factory that makes Ural motorcycles. Back in the Soviet days he was a young talented engineer trying to improve the design of the Ural boxer engine. His passion was to develop water cooling for the ancient German design. Water cooling makes motors produce more power and last longer. But the soviet factory directors didn't like this idea, why bother spending money if there was no competition anyways.
Well I guess he got sick of that and left the factory, taking his prototypes with him. But the story does not end there, he went on to start his own company! He then developed a water cooling kit for the motor (this kit can be retrofitted to any Ural) but why stop there? He started building custom bikes for bikers all over Russia. He cleaned up at just about every bike show, winning countless awards. Now he sells his own accessories as well as complete bikes that have been improved in every way. How's that for an underdog story?
Go to his site have a look: http://www.kbmtc.ru/p7.htm
The site is a little clunky, but he probably made it himself!
Here's a photo of him at the IMZ factory, look at how many bikes are behind him. Now the factory makes bikes only to custom orders from USA, with a miserly turnaround of 2000 bikes per year (compared to 60,000 per year in Soviet days).
Kirill
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