Black Swan 'Z17/5'

This BMW K100 comes from Russia, and thanks to the collaboration with Petr Toluzakova journalist and photographer from Moscow, tells us of this bike and its creation of Z17 Customs
Mikhail Kostylev, the founder, talked a bit about the build process, here are his words:

Meeting with Timur (customer) occured while we were finishing Z17 #3 "Student" and starting Z17 #4 "Barni", so we warned that we were overloaded, but as always happy to meet new people and show our work, so we invited him to visit us.

After vising and seeing everything in details he finally decided that he wanted K100 caferacer.

Next day donor's search started. It took just two days to find it, Tim was lucky enough as the bike had just arrived to the showroom (together with 3 others) and was not even published anywhere. Surely, the best one was chosen. 

He wanted to bring it to us immediately, despite of the building queue. Unfortunately we agreed. That caused a bunch of problems later on, including threat of contract cancellation. We were not only under push with those projects in progress, but with the one we hadn't even started.

The season had started so temperature and blood pressure were growing hastily. Finally we talked about all inconvenient aspects and start the work. 

Innovations in "Black Swan" project compare to previous 4 projects are:

- seat for two and the fender 

- K&N air-filter 

- adjustable shock

One of the challenging detail was matching stripes on the seat and the tank, and another one is even distribution of diagonal stripes on the seat. You have to put the same pressure to have exact and parallel lines.

All in all project looks bold and solid and new owner is happy with it.

Photo by Petr Toluzakov
Z17 Customs (Moscow, Russia) and
Mikhail Kostylev conacts:
email: z17customs@yahoo.com
instagram: @z17customs
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/z17customs