Someone Built a Superbike Penny Farthing, and It Isn't In Portland

Yamaha prides itself on a concept it calls "Jin-Ki Kanno," which it describes for those who don't speak Japanese as being "the seductive exhilaration felt when they truly become one with their machine." Cue the Spice Girls up here, if you like.

And yet, in all the wildest dreams of all of Yamaha's many talented engineers over the years, I sincerely doubt that any of them possibly could have had a build this insane in their minds when they crafted the YZF-R6.

Customs, sure. They're a given in motorcycle world, and there's never really any accounting for what a person with an unrelenting obsession can do, particularly if they also have (or can scrounge up) a bunch of money to back it up. If they've also got engineering and/or mechanical skills? You are in for A TIME.

Friends, let me introduce you to the Super Farthing.

You're looking at the latest creation from a YouTuber who calls himself Gregulations, and it's a true masterpiece of British overengineering. The ginormous front wheel, he says, weighs around 165 kilograms on its own. That's nearly 364 pounds if you're playing along at home, or nearly as much as Yamaha's claimed dry weight (that's without fluids) of an entire R6. 

That hilariously massive front wheel is constructed from billet steel, as is the equally ridiculous swingarm. Greg says this is because it's what he had laying around, and it needed to be super extra mega strong to even begin to attempt the ridiculous feat of becoming the world's fastest penny farthing by exceeding a speed of approximately 22 miles per hour.

Of course, it also has no pedals, so can it really be considered a true penny farthing? BLASPHEMY. No wonder it's not allowed within the Portland city limits.

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Incidentally, those little outriggers on the back wheel were originally planned to be hydraulically foldable, so they could neatly tuck up along the swingarm and render this contraption a true powered two-wheeler. Do we see it in this video? I'm going to give you a spoiler right now and tell you that no, we absolutely do not. They do, in fact, stay down the entire time.

But the process of trial and error, the editing, and the multiple test runs we do get to see in this video are worth your 20-ish minutes of time. That goes double during this strange, nebulous in-between time, when it's no longer Christmas and it's also not quite the New Year. It's the strange, overengineered, "why would someone build that???" custom of your half-baked fever dreams.

Get another cup of cocoa and enjoy.

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