Called the RSD Scout, this custom new Scout was first shown in its raw form last year, and now completed, it was flown over from California for a debut at the Wheels & Waves festival held in Biarritz, France.
“Stylistically this RSD Scout points towards the future with say a 15% nod to the Scout of the past. What it’s not is a ‘cruiser’ anymore. If you’re a traditional fan of the Indian Scout than you understand that the Scout was originally a racer. This RSD Scout carries that racing heritage.” says Roland Sands.
As soon as the Scout was released during the 2014 Sturgis Rally, he and his team knew they wanted to use the bike’s water-cooled V-twin engine in something customized. This desire was shared by one of Roland’s customers – known only as Thor – who had previously commissioned RSD’s Track Chief custom and wanted Roland to make him something out of an Indian Scout.
The RSD team completely deconstructed the stock Scout and rebuilt it with a frame made from ChroMoly. “The actual frame we came up with is very similar to the one we used for Victory’s Project 156,” Roland explains. “What that means is it’s a very lightweight frame with much more aggressive geometry than the stock Scout frame, shorter and with less rake. We’ve also used the same rear suspension package we used for Project 156. If you’re hip to the Polaris method, the Scout and the Project 156 share some mounting points, which made this project much easier as we’d perfected the suspension geometry on the 156.”
Initially Roland built a raw, unpainted version of the bike for Thor to ride to the Burning Man event in 2015. It had exposed wiring, a mangled mess of cooling pipes and radiators complete with Zip Ties. It’s safe to say madness is an inherent part of many of our projects. After all, who wants to rip apart a completely perfect brand new motorcycle and reconstruct it from the ground up?
RSD has since been working on the bike to create something that draws a heavy inspiration from the past while also increasing the level of performance. They built a complete ChroMoly girder fork from scratch that dominates the look of the front of the bike. New radiators were built and the cooling system was tidied up. A faux oil bag was made to house all of the electronics and a custom stainless exhaust using RSD’s in-house new “Track” muffler components was put together. The shock on the rear is an Ohlins TTX normally used on mountain bikes.
The frame, fork and swingarm were all powder coated in a beautiful vintage Indian red color and Airtrix performed the matching paint job with hand-turned gold leaf accents. Roland Sands Design.
Me likey. If they could produce the frame, fork and tank as a kit, it’d be in line.
Where’s the radiator on the bike pictured first?
All 3 look great, but the top one looks best sans radiator.
Nice Bike, Roland Sands has great taste or at least it is like mine lol
Pity about the water tank but these are coming to all eventually
Good work there! peace