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Wednesday 17 FebrUary 2010 www.motorcyclenews.com
News Deus Ex Machina
Riding five Deus masterpieces
SEE THE VIDEO www.motorcyclenews.com No rear suspension, just a well-sprung saddle you just can’t help bouncing around on
►Adorning the Deus showroom are dozens of handmade specials ►MCN picks five and takes them for a spin Continues from previous Away from the glitz, glamour and ‘lifestyle’, Sydney’s Deus Ex Machina is all about its brilliantly-engineered and beautifully executed two-wheeled pieces of art. The firm will work its magic on any bike from the Triumph Thruxton to the
Yamaha MT-01 you see on these pages, but it mainly uses Kawasaki’s W650 and the Yamaha SR400 (we never got this model in the UK, only the SR500). The Kawasaki and Yamaha are chosen for their simplicity, so they’re ripe for the Deus custom touch. Aside from
fruitier exhausts and less restrictive air filters, engines usually remain standard so the bikes stay ultra-reliable and most importantly easy to use. MCN Senior Road Tester Michael Neeves picked out five creations from the showroom and took them for a ride…
This bike belongs to one of the Deus bosses and yes, the red wheel is intentional
This is a stunning conversion that stops you in your tracks MCn’s MiChael neeves
Kawasaki Bobber £15,600
Dare’s Triumph Thruxton, £45,000 This Triumph Thruxton belongs to partowner of Deus, Dare Jennings and it’s been designed to look ‘industrial’ and ‘unfinished’. As well as a tuned, big-bore 904cc motor and an aftermarket polished aluminium tank and seat unit, it has a front end from an Aprilia Tuono, complete with its red cast aluminium wheel, which doesn’t match the wire-spoked rear (on purpose!), and a hand-painted matt white exhaust Thanks to the tuning and extra capacity of the motor this bike delivers a healthy punch in the stomach at high revs too and an ear-splitting yowl from the wholly illegal two-into-one Deus reverse megaphone exhaust system. Despite the stripped-bare ‘bitza’ look, the Triumph is well put together and works impeccably. The controls are smooth, the riding position comfortable,
despite rearsets and low clip-ons and the twin four-piston Tuono brake set-up make this the best-stopping Thruxton I’ve ever ridden. The Ohlins rear shocks give excellent support at the rear end and help sharpen the steering over the standard model, despite the tyres. The only thing about the ‘bitza’ style that doesn’t work are those tyres. The front is a sporty, grippy Pirelli Diablo and the rear a Metzeler Marathon touring/cruiser tyre and the profiles conflict with each other badly. You have to fight the Thruxton into a corner and fight to keep it at full lean. Tyres aside, Dare’s Triumph is spectacular. It would be hold its head up high on track days, be perfect for Sunday blasts, sounds fantastic and is achingly cool too. Best of all it’s not the kind of bike you’d wrap in cotton wool so you can ride it every day.
Technical highlights
■ Air-cooled parallel twin-cylinder engine, bored out from 865cc to 904cc, gas-flowed head, slightly more aggressive camshaft and billet aluminium inlet manifold and oilcooler. 39mm Keihin flat slide carbs with K&N air filter, Deus 2-1 reverse megaphone exhaust. Power: 85bhp at the rear wheel. ■ Standard frame and swingarm. Deus air-box removal kit, battery and electrics all relocated under rear seat hump. Deus alloy tank and MAS seat unit. Deus chopper-style headlight, Rizoma grips and mirrors. ■ Aprilia Tuono 43mm fullyadjustable forks. Aprilia Tuono twin 320mm front discs and four-piston calipers. Berringer master cylinder.
It takes a bit of time to get your head around the fact this isn’t an old hardtail Harley, but a common-or-garden Kawasaki W650. It’s an unbelievable conversion which stops you in your tracks and inspires instant lust. The front half of the frame is standard and the rear subframe and swingarm is dumped in favour of a new solid Deus rear frame, minus suspension. The only thing to save your bum from the bumps is the springs on the seat. It’s the first time I’ve ever ridden a hard-tail and I couldn’t help bouncing
up and down on the seat. It’s like trying a new bed in a shop… For normal street riding, the absence of rear suspension isn’t as weird as you’d imagine and the ride and handling feel quite normal. The stubby two-into-one ‘hot dog’ exhaust, complete with exhaust bandage to give it the authentic vintage appearance, looks and sounds fantastic. The minimalist ‘bobber’ look is completed with spoked wheels with a ‘balloon’ Firestone rear tyre and 21in front, slash-cut front and rear mudguards, tiny ‘peanut’ fuel tank and beautiful retro paintjob.
Deus MT-01 Tracker £12,500 It’s not just the retro look Deus can do as this modified Yamaha MT-01 Street Tracker shows. It’s still pretty much standard but has a new subframe and seat unit, lower gearing, straight bars, lighter wheels and a bright orange paintjob. There’s no mistaking it’s an MT-01 when you jump aboard as it’s still as heavy as a cruise ship and the grunt from its 1670cc V-twin engine means all the power is low in the revs, like a diesel. It’s more frisky than the standard model thanks to the gearing and flat bars, you can even tease a wheelie out of it, but it’s too heavy to be any real fun.
Technical highlights
■ Remapped fuel injection and Deus Ex Machina two-into-one pipe. ■ Modified subframe and seat unit. Marchesini wheels. ■ LED rear light, small indicators, searchlight-style headlight, flat handlebars, trimmed front mudguard, solid rear sprocket with lower gearing, drilled sprocket cover and small stainless steel mirrors. ■ Lower gearing improves lowdown performance.
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He Dares, he wins Dare jennings maDe a fortune as the founDer of cult surf branD mambo. now he’s Doing it all again with retro-cool bikes
Wo r D s M IC H A E L S TA H L p H o t o s T H O M A S W I E L E C K I
E HELPED turn geeks and slobs into laid-back surfer dudes. Now he’s helping midlife crises sufferers and medical students to morph into motorcycling gods. Whether you’re into cars, bikes, trucks or treadleys, Dare Jennings just wishes the whole, wheeled world could be united … preferably under one of his T-shirts. Dare Jennings doesn’t just observe modern Australian culture, he creates it. Currently, he’s the big cheese at Deus ex Machina, not only the world’s most mispronounced motorcycle brand (‘day-us ex mack-ena’) but probably also the least understood. While conventional marketing wisdom is to target niches and whip them into near-fundamentalist exclusivity, Jennings yearns for a simpler age when doing stuff was cooler than owning stuff. His vision – and the aesthetic of Deus’s cult-hangout Sydney headquarters and everything it sells – seems to come from the 1940s or ’50s. Surfers rode trail bikes, hot-rodders went surfing, bikers went roller-skating and even the Fonz went ten-pin bowling. People expressed themselves with cars and bikes that were everything from hand-built
hard-working machinery – what Jennings calls ‘applied art’ – were to form the basis for his next venture. Equally, Jennings’ destiny was already written in film. His hero is 1960s-’70s American documentary maker Bruce Brown, who made two great, seminal films on lifestyle and outdoor culture: The Endless Summer (1964) on surfing, and On Any Sunday (1971), on motorcycling. Jennings is sitting in the ultra-groovy cafe of the Deus emporium in Sydney’s inner west. It’s 10am on a Friday and he’s just arrived at work on his distinctive, custombuilt Triumph Thruxton motorcycle. “I ordered all the [Triumph’s] bits to be as disparate as they could be, so it didn’t look like it was meant to be some grand vision,” he grins. “But eclectic is really hard to pull off.” It’s an interesting crowd in the cafe. Perhaps one-third are middle-aged blokes and couples. Some tote laptops, others helmets and leather jackets. But the majority are hip 20-somethings who’ve filtered in from nearby Sydney University and the surrounding dole-chic suburbs of Camperdown, Glebe and Newtown. One would think they’d be ashamed to be in the company of machines dedicated to making loud noise, burning fuel (and legs) and belching exhaust gas in the name of some grease-knuckled morons’ idea of leisure. Few could identify classics like the TZ350 Yamahas,
to hand-me-down. And behold, it was cool. Today, of course, even sub-cultures are snubcultures. Circuit racers diss drifting, V8 street-machiners spurn hot fours, sports-bike riders don’t care for dirt bikes and everybody, quite justifiably, dumps on Harley riders. It upsets Jennings who, at 57, has the wide-eyed, giggling innocence of a kid in a toy shop. “It’s a real bugbear of mine; I hate these guys who, in surfing, even kids on their ‘fixie’ [fixed-wheel] bikes or the sports-bike guys, take themselves way too seriously,” he scowls. “It’s all fun, and it should never be anything more than fun. It’s not a competition to see who knows the most. “We’re a pretty broad church [at Deus] … it’s about creating a culture that’s tangible; that people can identify with and become a part of. And within that culture there should be things to learn, things to find out about, things to admire, things to do … no-one [should] treat you like you’re not in the inner sanctum because you don’t know all this arcane detail.” Jennings is qualified to comment on youth culture. In 2000, he sold out of a little clothing business he’d co-founded 17 years earlier. Clothing? Mambo had become an international phenomenon, a wry, cartoon world of beer-growing trees, hot-rodding koalas and pooting pooches that Australians adopted as a national identity. Selling out of Mambo left Jennings with a reported eight-figure fortune and a seven-year, no-compete clause. But a lifelong relationship with motorcycles and honest,
Harley-Davidson XR750 flat-trackers and Indian board-racers strategically scattered among the ‘modern’ Deus bikes. The latter are retro-styled cafe racers, cleverly built on the basis of brand-new, Japanese commuter-bike frame, suspension and mechanicals. They’re the product of a trend spotted by Jennings on a trip to Japan. “I used to go to Japan four or five times a year, and I’d sit on the street corners and go, ‘Wow, everyone would want one of these, surely!’ That’s always been my failing – ‘I like it, so everybody will!’ “These Japanese guys were customising in a way that I thought was interesting,” Jennings continues. “It was old-school, but done in a contemporary sort of way. It was almost turning your back on the complexities of modern engineering and sticking with carburettor, cylinder, exhaust … things you could fiddle with, things you could play with.” The bikes were so bare that every engineering modification inevitably became a design element. Meaning they were not only individual, but authentic. “I guess what I was seeing there, without really articulating it at the time, was this kind of simplicity and purity of purpose,” Jennings says. “I’ve had somewhat of a fine art background, but I’ve always been more fascinated by applied art, and to me these were great examples of applied art – artistic objects, where the functionality creates the artistic aspect of them.” The Japanese had the benefit of new models that were
“[our custom bikes] are great examples of applieD art – the functionality creates the artistic aspect of them”
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jennings says he wanted to create ‘an involving culture’. grab a coffee, choose a shirt, catch the vibe and buy a $25K custom motorcycle
Drawing a line in the sand, man
jennings with deus creative linchpin carby tucKwell, busy creating understated cool that has nothing to do with the famous mambo farting dog
In his Mambo days, Jennings briefly got to work with automotive design. “Holden did a relaunch of the sandman [in 2000] and they asked us to decorate it,” he says. “[Mambo artist] David McKay did the artwork. they took it to America as a showpiece, but they had to paint a bra on the naked girl because the Americans were offended by it.” He told Holden: “Certainly many of us here at Mambo have a strong sentimental, even spiritual attachment to this much-loved classic having owned one, in the case of several staff members, or having been conceived in one, in the case of several junior staff members.”
already half-way to retro-dom. The frame and engine of Yamaha’s little SR400 single commuter bike has barely changed since the 1970s. Kawasaki’s W650 is a modern, bevel-drive ohc twin that mimics Kawasaki’s 1966 model (itself, a copy of the BSA A10). Triumph and Harley-Davidson, meanwhile, have long been milking their own histories with retro-styled models ripe for stripping down. Jennings, a long-time friend and customer of Sydney car and bike dealer Rod Hunwick, suggested there could be a business in it. The third business partner is graphic artist and brand builder Carby Tuckwell, whose line drawings and aesthetic direction have defined Deus’s identity. The group was also soon blessed with a JapaneseAustralian mechanic, Taka Aoyama, who had trained on the SR Yamahas and who could tap straight into the Japanese boutique brands that supply the handbeaten alloy fuel tanks, ducktail seats, billet aluminium mirrors and stretched, ‘widowmaker’ hillclimb swing-arms. Customers either buy from Deus a box-stock SR400 or W650 (models not sold here by their own brands) and start customising them, or pick from a constant stream of projects spun off by Deus’s backroom boys. They’re not cheap; most are double the price of the donor bike, making some hard-core riders scoff at a $20K, 400cc bike. “What I figured out very quickly was that it had to be a contemporary activity,” Jennings says, after Deus’s opening in 2007. “Museums are okay, but for me, it had to be something that was active – you could come and get one, you could build one, you could buy one, you could use it, you could talk to people about it. That was the more important part. “I didn’t care whether they made it themselves and showed it to us, or bought the bits off us or we made it for them. That didn’t matter, so long as the thing was rolling.” Strolling around Deus, the only comparable fourwheeled culture that comes to mind is the LA ‘rat rod’ scene. It has not escaped Jennings’ attention that the merchandising opportunities for that have already been “raped and pillaged” (by Von Dutch). But more importantly, cars no longer seem to lend themselves to such an accessible, easy-going scene. Jennings himself drives a four-year-old Range Rover Sport, which he says has now lost enough of its value that he’s considering some fat pipes and a matt-white paintjob. “I might as well just dick around with it… “I was sorta lucky because I did well out of selling my business, but I don’t want an Aston Martin or a whatever. There’s so little satisfaction in them. You can’t go fast in it, you can’t touch it, you just sit in it and feel pleased with yourself because you’ve got the money to buy it.” Jennings has, in the past, fallen hard for just two cars: a Jaguar XK-R (destroyed in the Sydney hail storms of 1999) and a Mercedes SL500. The Jag is remembered fondly for high-speed touring while visiting his home town of Griffith in southcentral NSW; the Mercedes for signalling the turning point where he “felt like a wanker
driving it, and pretty much gave up after that.” As a compliment to the automotive marketers, however, Jennings admits that both cars could be traced to his childhood: “There was a wealthy sheep guy up the road and he had an E-Type … I remember, the line of that car just suggested there was a lot more going on out in the world than driving a tractor around in ever-diminishing circles.” Another local grazier had a gondola-roofed SL280. Bizarrely – let’s say predictably bizarrely – Jennings has more of a romantic attachment to trucks. That pure functionality thing again? “In my 20s, I used to hitch-hike everywhere – I didn’t have a car – and I used to love trucks. Because they went a long way. Their industrial design was really fascinating to me, and I loved Mack trucks and Kenworths and Peterbilts and that big, tough American industrial design. “And I was in a Mack truck and this guy had a Mack Truck T-shirt and I went, ‘Wow, I’d love a Mack Truck T-shirt.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, this bloke had some, but they’re all gone.’ And I thought, maybe I’ll print some...”
“i Don’t want an aston or whatever. you just sit in it anD feel pleaseD with yourself because you can afforD it”
God-like machinery The Deus Ex Machina name comes from Latin and means ‘God is in the machine’. The bikes that bear the brand are old-school models that mostly come from Japan. Customers buy stock bikes and choose the mods, or splurge on a Deus custom job, such as the Kawasaki W650-based Swing Bobber (above), which gets a custom tank, modified rear frame and battery box, stubby
pipes, solo seat, Daytona headlight and speedo, all rolling on repainted standard rims. The donor Kawasaki W650 is a 676cc ohc twin that echoes mid-’60s classic British parallel twins such as the BSA A10 and Triumph Bonneville. With the Deus suite of mods, a Swing Bobber will set you back a cool $25,000. God may be in the machine, but the devil is in the price tag.
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