2005 Triumph Daytona 955i - The New Paradigm

Though you'd never know it from looking at this bike, builder Adam Canni swears that he's not a professional bike builder. A New Jersey native who graduated from Detroit's College of Creative Studies and who has since served as a design consultant for brands as diverse as General Motors, Yamaha and SPY Optics among others, Canni typically thinks of himself as a designer and not a bike builder. "My background is in industrial design within the automotive industry," Canni says. "This is the first full, from-the-ground-up custom bike I've ever designed and built."

Canni's ample design talents are obvious in this bike, based on a 2005 Triumph Daytona 955i that was given to him by the producers of the forthcoming "Metric Revolution" television series (www.metrictv.com) to serve as Canni's entry in the show's sportbike build-off. From the gorgeously proportioned bodywork to the intricate geometry of the rigid frame to the numerous clever technical solutions that Canni came up with to package the bike and make it work visually, this is one of the most complete and elegant custom motorcycle designs we've ever featured. Subtle and understated at first glance, Canni's Triumph blows you away upon closer inspection, with each new look turning up another brilliant detail-a hallmark of fine design.

Rather than setting out to create an evolution of the sportbike (or worse, a bastardized chopper), Canni set out here to create his perfect version of a sportbike-powered "power cruiser," inspired by one of his favorite motorcycles, the Yamaha Road Star Warrior, a bike that he has plenty of experience with via his design consultancy with Yamaha. "My goal was to build something that absolutely no one else in the build-off would think of, inspired by the kind of motorcycle I myself would imagine riding in the future," Canni says. "A serious power cruiser using a low, rigid frame and a sportbike motor is the wave of the future."

Save for the 955cc, three-cylinder engine, virtually nothing of the donor Triumph Daytona remains (build-off rules require that the sportbike motor remain, otherwise, builders basically have carte blanche to completely reimagine the style of the bike). The first time he rode the bike, Canni immediately fell in love with the Triumph's powerful and character-rich 146 hp motor, especially the Indy-car-like exhaust note, but thought very little of the conservative British styling, so he saw no problem in jettisoning the original frame and body. Canni proceeded directly to his computer-design station and drafted a new, rigid chassis that would form the basis of his perfect power cruiser.

To translate this dream design into reality, Canni's next step was to assemble a top team of fabricators to bring the project to life. "Unlike everyone else involved in the sportbike build-off, I didn't have my own bike shop, and I don't have the wrenching skills that a lot of other builders have," Canni says. To make up for this, he contracted his very talented friends at Detroit's Jolly Roger Customs to pull this project off in the 180-day deadline that the Metric TV producers were enforcing. "The guys at Jolly Roger, working under Darrian Tefft, the head fabricator, did all the necessary sheetmetal work from this wild dream I had in my mind, and the quality stands out," Canni says.

Canni and the Jolly Roger crew started the project off by designing and welding up the new perimeter engine cradle to carry the inline-three motor. The engine is mounted as a stressed member (just like on the original Daytona) and held in place by a series of gorgeously arced frame tubes. Look closely and you might see some resemblance in the main frame spars and backbone to Roland Sands' "No Regrets" custom featured in our October 2006, issue. Canni and Sands are friends, and they frequently consult with one another, Canni says; the two shared a few ideas over the course of this project. The rigid rear portion of the chassis is especially stunning, a beautiful geometry of arced tubes that are carefully placed to prioritize both strength and aesthetics, the many bends perfectly complementing each other.

According to Canni, the biggest challenge in this project was to hide all the electronic equipment on the bike, to present a clean, uncluttered look now that the engine would be fully on display. Like all modern sportbikes, the fuel-injected, liquid-cooled Triumph Daytona is very complex, and since on that bike the motor is usually hidden behind full-coverage bodywork, Triumph's engineers haven't taken any great pains to make the motor look pretty. Canni started by simplifying the stock wiring harness as much as possible, eliminating any "superfluous" circuits like turn signals and the kickstand warning switch, eventually trimming more than 30 inches from the stock, five-and-a-half foot-long wiring harness. What was left of this mass of high-voltage spaghetti was carefully packed into the rubber-mounted, silver-painted steel cover that looks to the untrained eye like a traditional, teardrop-shaped chopper gas tank. Canni also made room under that "tank" for the gel-cell battery, coolant overflow tank and airbox, and then crafted a custom radiator to tuck almost invisibly under the front edge of the tank, between the forward frame spars, to create the illusion of a visually simpler, air-cooled bike. Where is the fuel carried? Peep the hand-formed air dam in front of the engine that pulls double duty as a fuel tank to maintain Canni's compact, mass-centralized design theme.

The front end is a shortened fork from Mean Streets Performance, positioned on a headtube that provides 43 degrees of rake and eight inches of stretch. The rims are custom billet units designed by Canni (incorporating his trademark lucky horseshoe) and fabricated by Ego Tripp, the front a chopper-spec 21x4-inch rim and the rear 18x10 for the right fat-tire look. Most of the other bolt-on components are sourced from Canni's many friends and co-conspirators in the American aftermarket, including Arlen Ness (kickstand, pegs) and Performance Machine (six-piston front and four-piston rear brakes). The exhaust, on the other hand, is pure sportbike, a Micron hydroformed MotoGP canister originally intended for a Yamaha R6. "I'd sketched something similar and intended to have it custom built," Canni says, "but when I saw this Micron piece, it was exactly what I wanted so we used that to save some time and budget." Heck, Canni even raided the mountain-bike aftermarket for parts, mounting the stunning, caf-racer-style seat shell onto a pair of coil-over shock absorbers intended for a Cannondale mountain bike.

Canni is highly critical of what he sees as an embarrassing lack of proportion in most of today's custom sportbike designs, and he points out that his machine maintains a strict sense of proportion and continuity of design. "We took the engine and drivetrain and really pushed and pulled the proportions of the overall bike until everything fit perfectly," Canni says. "The biggest problem with a lot of these customized sportbikes is their odd proportions-guys will throw an extended swingarm on a bike with stock bodywork, and they end up looking like hill-climb bikes with fairings or something else equally ridiculous."

Canni's custom Triumph looks right from every angle, and thanks to careful planning and design, it rides right too. This bike is significantly lighter than a stock Daytona with the same power output-making expensive motor mods unnecessary, Canni says. "With light weight and 140-plus horsepower, we don't need nitrous, turbos or any of that stuff." Due to the lack of rear suspension, the bike doesn't squat during rapid acceleration and instead rockets forward like a drag bike. "A stock Daytona will have you on your head if you give it full throttle in the lower gears," Canni notes. "When you give this one full throttle in those same gears, it will pull a low 10-second quarter mile. We might just have one of the world's fastest cruisers on our hands," he says, laughing.

A perfect power cruiser indeed.