Bionicle MOC: Cerberus Chopper

About the MOC
This is another MOC that happened kind of by accident or on a whim. After seeing 's Grind Star I was inspired to use my Dark red and black Marbled/gradient parts to make something. The end result became a chopper style motorcycle. I suppose thinking about how the wheels come from the Furno Bike or Speeda Demon's motorcycle is what led me to go the direction of a chopper. I started with an initial idea for the front forks which turned out very well.
Then I spent three days on the rear wheel. I didn't illustrate it here in the photos but when you turn the rear wheel, a series of gears connected to the turntable part on the other side make the hub/rim counter rotate. So if this chopper was roaring down the street the back rim would be spinning the opposite direction. This is probably one of the most complicated pieces of functional design I've ever created. I spent three days just working on this section alone. I first got it, then I spent two days refining it so that the turn table and rim were closer to the wheel. Check out a video of the rear wheel in action here.
Now I had sort of a back and a front and had to bridge the two. I struggled with this until I finally scrapped the front fork design keeping the ideas I liked(like the Pyrox mask and the Piraka feet), doing a lot of research by looking up many photos of the key areas of a chopper to really understand how they work and build the MOC like an actual chopper(i.e making the frame, then connecting the forks, building the engine, transmission, gas tank, etc).
This was quite an interesting build in the sense that it's both symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. It was a lot of fun chunking through this build one actual part of a motorcycle at a time. I felt like one of the guys on those chopper shows like Orange County Choppers or Biker Buildoff that used to be popular on The Discovery channel.

This is the first MOC of mine to really benefit from me moving my laptop into my MOC room. I relied heavily on photo searching google to look at the different aspects of choppers. Looking back on it I realize I went for a "simplified realism" approach. The chopper features things like head and tail lights, license plate, gas tank with spout, brake controls and brake lines on the handle bars, functional drive line(wheel connected by Technic chain to "transmission" which is connected via belt drive to motor), engine with fuel line and semi-realistic foot controls(clutch). Though I didn't get too obsessed with the details. I thought about adding things like gauges and other technical bits, but felt they would have distracted from the simpler edgier look of the bike. Thinking back on it, the license plate is probably a bit much as well. The nice thing about Choppers is there's a great many kind, from very commercial to customization to the extreme of impracticality and everything in between. This in a way was freeing because I could make it as long or as short as I wanted, make the gas tank or seat however I wanted and I even came across some that had an open sided wheel like this one has. This also presented a bit of a challenge as I had to look at many different kinds of cycles to see what the "common denominators' where. At the end of the day. I think I did a good job recreating a chopper fairly accurately thanks to having a laptop handy to reference photos. Man I shoulda gotten into the habit of taking my laptop in with me ages ago. Now it'll be a permanent fixture in my MOC room.

I got the idea to call it Cerberus fairly early on, but the reason for it changed about midway through. Initially I was going to call it Cerberus thinking that it would figuratively have three heads, the Pyrox mask on the front wheel, the Kalmah head as the gas tank, and the rider's actual head. However several other head pieces were added as I finished out the build. So now I count the pyrox head and the two wolf heads on the handle bars as its "three heads."
For those of you who might not know, Cerberus is a rather famous figure in ancient Greek Mythology. He is typically depicted as a three headed dog with serpents all over his body, though modern depictions show him mostly as three headed dog of some sort. The serpents don't tend to stay. Cerberus guarded the gates of Hades to keep anyone from escaping. The Twelfth trial of Hercules was to subdue Cerberus without the use of any weapons.



Bio
No Bio as of Now. Bio will come when Cerberus has a rider.

The Background in this photo collage's is 's Ashlands  . Wes is an amazing digital artist and a pretty insightful and nice guy. I highly recommend you check his other works out.