Roses have a special place in many cultures. They are beautiful to see and to smell, but they do have sharp thorns, sort of beauty with a bite. There are red roses given on Valentine’s Day, the famous yellow roses of Texas, but black roses hold a very special place in magic and mysticism and havemesmerized people for centuries. A pure black rose has been the Holy Grail of plant breeders worldwide who spent eons attempting to create one. However, no such pure black rose exists—until now.
Well, maybe. Enter Carlos Orta who has “cultivated” a Black Rose of his own creation and certainly the only one in existence. Maybe it has something to do with Carlos’ abode in Miami Beach, Florida, the Sunshine State. The region provides a warm and often wet environment, just the right aura for growing strange fauna and flora.
“I was tired of seeing people take parts off shelves and build bikes that look the same, so I decided that if I was going to do this, I was going to build something as different as I could. If I didn’t come up with something original, it wasn’t worth doing. It was a matter of leaving a mark, at least for myself,” says Carlos.
As for inspiration Carlos attributes much of his, to his son’s penchant for listening frequently to the music of Marilyn Manson and in particular a new song, at the time, called “This is the New Shit.” That was exactly what he had in mind when stepping way out of the box to build his dream bike.
He laughs, and says, “I would listen to the song, and that’s all it took for me to get going. It actually took more time thinking through the design, than fabricating it. My approach was very unorthodox. For example, one of the first parts I completed was the seat. The design was inspired by the Mongol horseman riding saddles. It’s very exotic looking thanks to its pierced phallus riding horn and pierced tongue rear section, but when you sit on it, it’s very comfortable. What looks like tooled leather on the tank is actually hand formed aluminum.”
“I originally made the pieces in leather, but then I had a dream late one night. I saw a biker riding in front of me. His wallet, connected by a chain, slipped out of his pocket and came flying back at me. I sat up in bed, woke up my wife and said, ‘I know how I’m going to do it.’ I replicated the leather parts out of aluminum.”
Carlos choose from a wide, and wild, assortment of materials to create his intricately conceived dream machine including stainless steel, aluminum, bronze, brass, silver braid and engraving.
Greatness, they say, or madness, is in the details. For instance check out the treatment Carlos gave the brake and clutch levers. Most of the design was inspired by musical instruments such as the control mechanism found on saxophones and clarinets. Carlos also hand fabricated his own master cylinders with their unique Victorian look. And that throttle grip… when you twist it, it twists all the way up to the risers but the custom-made mirror remains stationary, creating a trick optical illusion.
Carlos, basically a one-man band, also hammered out the gas tank and cut the trees from billet, eventually attaching all his one-off pieces to a Chopper Guys Swedish-style frame. “The only modification to the frame was to the center support tube. It didn’t have the same angle as the engine’s cylinder, so I cut them out and replaced them with stainless steel parts so that when you look at the bike the angles match and it flows better.”
The motor itself is an Evo Top/Pan bottom 96-cubic-inch S&S (with S&S carb), the ponies sent to an Avon 250-series rear tire covered by a fender Carlos cut from a blank. The oil tank is a combination of stainless steel and brass, again hand made.
The stock 42mm H-D front end was complimented by Carlos’ skill at engraving, and the stainless steel cups he fashioned for it. He also modified the rear center wheel hub out of stainless steel, so that he could use a rear drum brake and for the Old School look, went for the traditional star-hub look, then had Buchannan’s lace them up. Carlos also made the exhaust system, basically straight pipes with special tip treatments while the heat shields are made to look like leather.
“When I showed the bike at Daytona Biketoberfest, a lot of the hardcore guys looked at the heat shields and started laughing,” Carlos said. “I had to tell them it wasn’t leather but metal, and they had to touch it to believe me.”
“Everybody now is trying to hide things on their customs, but I wanted to show everything, to make it visible, but in an interesting way. Obviously there’s a lot of sexual connotations, the pierced tongues and so forth, but I didn’t want to produce yet another theme bike per se. I wanted each individual who looked at the bike to see something else. For example, some people see a Mariachi bike; some see a sex imagery bike. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
As far as cosmetics, Carlos says, “There’s no chrome. I didn’t want the Black Rose to look like a traditional show bike where everything is polished perfectly. I wanted little hairlines to show on the aluminum and stainless…I wanted that patina.” The frame, fender, tank were painted with PPG pigments while the rims were powder coated.
So how was Carlos able to create such a complex bike, an eight month project, for the most part all on his own? It turns out that he works at a Florida university, as a Mechanical Engineer, in a Physics Department, where he fabricates scientific equipment. He does want to credit mechanic, Matthew Crosby, for help in “growing” the Black Rose.
Says Carlos, summing up his efforts, “My goal, as I mentioned, was to make my mark by creating motorcycles in the most unique way possible. My ultimate goal is to create a bike that not only shows shape and color but intense details throughout, to create a work that makes the public stop in their tracks and make their jaws drop.”
I think we can say….Mission accomplished.
For more info about his rolling work of art and his other offerings, check out his web site as www. www.ortamotorcycles.com.
