On the 14th of January, exactly ten days ago, was the 131st birthday of Giovanni Ravelli, the co-founder of Moto Guzzi. He was also a WW1 fighter pilot, aviator and a motorcycle racer who earned the nickname ‘The Italian Devil’.

Showing great respects to his stature, the chaps at Death Machines of London (DML) custom built a 1982 Moto Guzzi LeMans Mk2 machine as a tribute to Giovanni. They took the old rusting bike and converted into a futuristic café-racer that’s got an enormous amount of imagination put into it. Just look at it and you’ll know what I mean.

To keep things authentic, the guys at Death Machines went about Italy to find an old relic of the iconic Italian brand that had a rich racing history of winning almost 3000 races and a couple dozen world championships. Luckily, they found one lying in a yard in southern Italy, corroding away in the sun and salty air.

Despite all of that, the engine was absolutely perfect and in “remarkable condition”. Still, the motor was stripped down in their London garage and re-assembled with full forensic inspection, vapor cleaning, replacement bearings, and seals gaskets to get it up and running.

Modified 36mm pumper Dell’Orto carburetors acted with in-house velocity stacks and open slash cut headers. The whole setup looks the part and is one of the best in the business. The cylinder heads got a proper refresh with the bespoke gas flow. The gearing on this motor gets a revamped Stucchi linkage.

With the engine cleaned and re-tuned, they turned the focus onto the Guzzi’s legendary ‘Tonti’ frame. They made sure they didn’t tinker much with the frame since it was already a winner. “You pick a line and they follow it”. It gets a custom ‘Airforce Grey’ paintjob, and to keep things clean, DML made away with steel luggings and welded the frame tubes together instead.

Custom headstocks see an increase in the rake angle by 3 degrees and the rear frame is swapped out for a heavily modified Moto Guzzi California swing arm to show more of those eye-popping wheels (coming later). The rear springs also are replaced by a mono shock cantilevered system that’s been rarely used anywhere these days. It's an aviation-inspired bespoke item courtesy of Hagon.That was a brave move.

The front unit has been picked up from the Aprilia RS250 arrangement and is customized with new valves and a high polished look. Firestones tires keep the vintage appeal on modified California Hubs laced onto aluminum rims. The rear gets hand spun aluminum disc covers to give it the ‘racer’ appeal. Braking is handled by a pair of billet four-pot Brembo calipers clutching onto bespoke 300mm steel rotors.

Turning attention to the juicy detailings and the bodywork, the Airforce gets a whole bunch of custom made items: clip-on tubes, grips, internal throttle, matching footpegs, and the beautiful inverse Lever Type IN01 that is been machined from aviation grade aluminum. A single Xenon projector upfront and an LED rear light housed in a custom cluster keep things subtle yet voguish.

The instrument cluster protrudes from the tank and gets precision etched in nickel silver and brass. The fancy part about this is its dimmable illumination that can be controlled via a dedicated controller. wow! But that is not even as glitzy as the ¼ inch guitar jack ignition that comes with an immobilizer proximity sensor. These guys are pretty serious eh?

The bodywork is basically a wood skeleton wrapped in aluminum. It’s the classic buck technique where the panels were beaten and welded by hand. The makers decided to keep the imperfections of this technique rather than getting a paintjob done. To keep things raw, they brushed the panels just like the WW1 fighter jets.

The bottom belly pan gets double skinned and encloses the exhaust piping. A handstitched leather saddle with a strip of leather on the tank gives the perfect contrast to the all-aluminum outlook.

All of this took the boys 112 days to build and was first showcased at the 2107 Bike Shed event in London. The Airforce definitely knows how to capture the essence of Mr. Giovanni Ravelli’s ideology. And that, my friends, is making a statement.