When Stefano Venier, owner of Venier Customs in Brooklyn, decided to do a custom bike for Andy Chase, a New York musician and producer that fell in love with the Diabola V35C, the Moto Guzzi’s new 1380cc engine and the California 1400 touring bike. So they joined forces and modified the perfect bike for Chase.
With an obvious chemistry and similar design ideas, the two left their first meeting feeling inspired and excited to start work on a bike unlike anything either of them as done before.
They started out by stripping the 2013 California down. The next two months were spent shaping foam prototypes of the new bodywork, which was then sent off to a metal fabricator to be translated to a metal frame. The entire frame was hand-crafted from the fenders to the headlight buckets. A slim LED tail light was neatly integrated into the seat with rear turn signals embedded in the frame of the rails.
The felt the engine was perfect the way it was, so it remained pretty much standard. The exhaust, however, was fully custom setup with Mass Moto. With a sublime gloss black paint job and a single dark grey stripe on the tank to help accentuate the beauty of the curves, the California’s no exception to the elegant bikes that comes from Venier customs.
This elegant lightweight touring bike may be available for sale very soon. Phase two for Venier is to produce and sell this bike as a limited edition touring bike.
“I think Moto Guzzi made their best motorcycle ever, but this bike has a very aggressive engine that really deserves to be used in a much different, more exciting kind of setup.” – Venier