RONDINE

From a small town near From Cork, Ireland, Medaza Cycles grabbed the traditional custom world by the nose in 2013, winning the AMD World Championship in Essen, Germany with this machine, based on a 1971 Moto Guzzi Falcone Nuovo flat single. The World Championship was a big surprise to Medaza team Don Cronin and Michael O’Shea as well; they consider themselves “amateur builders” – meaning they build bikes for the love of it. Southern Ireland has a strong motorcycle culture of road racing and world speed record attempts in the 1930s (on Cork’s public roads, no less.) Cronin and O’Shea’s local riding club is known informally as “the Ducks,” and of the five previous Irish AMD champions, four choppers were built by “Ducks.” Cronin preferred café racers to choppers, so that’s what he’s always built, and considered the Moto Guzzi single an interesting start for a build; “The Nuovo Falcone is considered the poor relation of the more venerable Falcone, so they’re a bit easier to source. In standard form they’re ugly as sin, but therein lay the challenge!”

Cronin and O’Shea completely re-imagined the Guzzi, turning an ugly duckling into bird of prey. Only the engine remains from the original, and even that was stretched for more power, with a 580cc kit and engine tuning mods, including replacement of the steel “bacon slicer” flywheel with a groovy aluminum piece. “Rondine’s” chassis is where the bike really shines, and incorporates a surprising number of Harley- Davidson V-Rod parts. Both wheels are V-Rod, modified to accept disc brakes, and a V-Rod swingarm has been split in two to form the blades of a Vincent “Girdraulic”-type front fork – an ingenious re-invention of junkyard parts to serve functions never imagined in Milwaukee.

Follow the Builder: Medaza Cycles