STINGRAY: AN OTHERWORLDLY ADDITION TO THE HAAS MUSEUM

#STINGRAY #HAAS #MUSEUM
THERE’S A TERM that was fashionable in MotoGP racing a few years ago: ‘Aliens.’ It referred to the small group of factory riders who seemed to operate at a higher level than everyone else, with astonishing speed and ability.
The custom world has its own Aliens, and we could probably all agree on the members of that group. But it looks like we have a new entrant: the Canadian builder Jay Donovan.
Jay is no grizzled veteran of the scene (sorry, Craig Rodsmith). He’s a young British Columbian in his mid-twenties, and the man behind Baresteel Design.
He’s based in the garden city of Victoria, and despite his tender years, has a quite remarkable ability to shape metal-a trait we noticed when we featured his Yamaha XS650 a couple of years ago.
Bobby Haas, the founder of the mindboggling Haas Moto Museum in Texas, noticed this ability too. And he gave Jay a commission to build a machine for the museum, with carte blanche on the direction.
“Jay and I cloistered ourselves in his shop and refined a life-sized sketch of what would ultimately become Stingray,” Bobby tells us. “We tossed ideas back and forth all day long, and then I just handed the baton over to Jay.”
The task was formidable, and Bobby knew it. “It is enormously challenging to infuse an e-bike with the aesthetics and romance of an internal combustion cycle,” he notes. “You are deprived of most of the iconic visual elements of a classic motorcycle-carburetors, pipes and so on-and handed a bunch of battery boxes in their place.”
Jay points out that electric motorcycles basically fall into three categories: “A futuristic abstract design, or something meant to look like a vintage cafe racer, or a typical sport bike.”
He started by examining these patterns: “They’re all concepts dealing with the same issues.” And the chief issue? How to incorporate “the design irritation of the ‘brick’.”
On his Yamaha XS650, Jay explored what he calls “fundamental design elements,” but this time he decided to experiment-to disregard standard proportion and geometry. “It meant abandoning the way I usually operate,” he says. “It made the process excruciating for me mentally, but also beneficial in the end.”
The core of Stingray is an ME1507 power unit from the Wisconsin company Motenergy. It’s a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) with a continuous power output of 14.5 kW.
This compact 44-pound motor is now surrounded by chromoly steel, which Jay used to build the frame, forks, and swingarm. Virtually every component is curved on three axes, and uses as few pieces as possible. The looped downtube, for instance, is made from a single piece.
The tighter radii were created on rolling and bending machines, but the third dimension had to be bent by hand-using a torch and steel bucks specifically made for each part. The strength of the frame relies on the abstract triangulation of the curved tubes.
The motor is offset to one side, aligning the drive sprocket with the center of the bike. This allowed room on the other side for the battery management system, as well as a jackshaft located through the swingarm pivot.
The secondary shaft allowed Jay to manipulate the gearing, and decrease the rear sprocket diameter-“Something I thought would take away from the diameter and drama of the front hub.”
The rear hub is another piece designed from scratch, although Jay took inspiration from Max Hazan’s KTM boardtracker. “The rear wheel on that thing was too cool, and I loved the star lace pattern.”
Jay describes the front suspension as a “rather odd trailing-link-springer type setup,” which is supported by a FOX mountain bike shock. “I knew I needed to keep the forks as narrow as possible, to allow for steering clearance underneath the low hanging fairing.”
Jay’s designed the front hub with an internal rotor, dual Brembo calipers and two large discs: “They’re essentially wheel spacers, but act as a visual focal point for the forward leaning body … used the discs as a pickup point for the front suspension linkage, so the entire linkage system could be contained between the fork legs.”
The wheels were custom made for this project by Stephen Hood at Vintage Rims in Australia. “They were designed to resemble the simplistic appearance of an old clincher rim,” says Jay, “but built wider-and with an edge bead designed to hold modern tires.”
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