The Revival Birdcage is a glorious custom bike

By topgear, 18 April 2019
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Be still our beating hearts. The wonderfully artistic creation you see above is the brand-new bike from American customisers Revival, and isn’t it beautiful.

Its retro style is defined by that cage-like frame. It’s made of titanium and its shape is inspired by German motorcycle racer Ernst Henne’s record-setting machines from the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The frame serves another purpose too though – it has been designed to show off BMW’s brand-new, air-cooled boxer engine.

We don’t know too many details about said engine yet, but we do know it’ll be a bit of a beast in terms of displacement, aimed at taking the fight to Harley-Davidson and Indian in the US.

BMW has nearly 100 years of tradition with boxer-powered motorbikes though, so this new one is likely to be something very special. The Motorrad team will produce its own concept to surround the engine in the next few months, before we see a production bike in 2020. 

It’s somewhat of an unwritten rule here in the TG office that bikes have to be pretty special to garner any kind of reaction, so if that’s what we’re judging it on then Revival has clearly done something right. Agree?