Gold Dust: A BMW R 12 Street Tracker to Match a Safari Porsche 911

Rough Crafts has mastered the art of building formidable custom motorcycles that are swathed in obsidian hues. But the Taiwanese outfit knows how to play with color when the occasion calls for it.

Their latest release is a sharp BMW R 12 nineT street tracker that borrows its color palette from a custom-built safari-style Porsche 911. Both the car and the motorcycle belong to GrowthRing & Supply Co. (or GRS)—a streetwear label headquartered in Hong Kong.

The Porsche had already been built when Rough Crafts was tasked with creating a bike to complement it. “We were thinking about what motorcycle we could match with a Porsche, and it turned out that BMW was the way to go,” says Rough Crafts frontman Winston Yeh. “The Porsche boxer and the BMW Motorrad boxer just make sense together.”

As luck would have it, the job was booked in as Rough Crafts was buttoning up another R 12 nineT project. Winston and his cohorts were building the parts for that bike from their home base in Taipei, so that they could ship them to Japan, where a local BMW dealership would assemble the bike.

Since GRS wanted to launch their custom BMW R 12 nineT at the annual Yokohama Hot Rod Custom Show, Winston decided to piggyback off the other project and use the same trick. But the GRS bike called for several unique details, so very few parts were shared between the bikes.