Meet the Super-Farthing | Swindon engineer turns scrap Yamaha R6 into steampunk penny farthing
What do you get when you combine hundreds of kilos of spare steel, a ratty 20-year-old Yamaha R6, and almost 750 hours of hair-brained brilliance? The answer is the world’s fastest penny farthing.
Swindon-based engineer, Greg Mitchell created the ‘Super-Farthing’ in his spare time from the ashes of his former business assets, fitting the project in between family life and a full-time job by climbing out of bed at 3am most mornings to crack on with his creation.
After months of work, the somewhat finished Frankenbike now weighs in close to half a tonne and sits a metre taller than Yamaha intended the four-cylinder supersport bike to be.
This lofty lift is thanks to a watermill rivalling 165kg front wheel, made up of 420 pieces of individually machined billet steel paired to a similarly massive vertical swingarm set-up.
Keeping the contraption upright is a pair of stabilisers. Initially these were liftable via hydraulics, but it became apparent that the Super-Farthing was too unwieldy to ever be ridden without them – at least at speeds achieved so far.
“The idea for it came in a dream,” Mitchell told MCN. “I fell asleep watching YouTube videos and then dreamt of making this bike.
“I woke up and immediately wrote it down. I can’t draw, so got AI to mock it up and I knew then that I just needed to make it.”
Initially, the aim was to craft the Super-Farthing’s components from aluminium, but with the associated raw material bill sitting at north of £4000, the engineer had to find another option.
Luckily, a solution was buried right beneath his feet. “I ran my own business, doing it for a few years making all sorts of stuff.
“Unfortunately, I got screwed for a lot of money so had to close the business. When I did, the liquidator was going to chuck out about four tonnes of steel.
“They weren’t even going to scrap it, so I asked if I could have some. They said yes, so I went and buried it in my back garden – the whole lot.
“This project was an opportunity to use some of that up. I wouldn’t have been able to attempt this otherwise,” Mitchell continued.
The process that followed his initial brainwave would see the engineer invest 437 hours into machining the parts alone, with the resulting front hoop and swingarm already fabricated long before a bike to attach them to had been sourced.
Then, after securing the ideal noughties supersport, the subsequent process of screwing the whole lot together occupied a further 300 hours of time, thanks in part to the mass of challenges encountered during assembly.
This included repositioning the Yamaha’s exhaust and radiator, tapping 890 M8 holes by hand and re-machining a vast quantity of parts after Mitchell realised he’d forgotten to model brake caliper mounting points.
So what’s it like to ride? Initial testing quickly flagged some minor teething problems, among which being that even when at full steering lock, the bike would only go straight due to huge fork flex. The ultra-modified R6 also stubbornly followed any road camber, despite rider input.
On top of this, the undersprung standard shock absorber unit would lengthen significantly under throttle load, tucking the swingarm under the machine and lifting the stabilisers off the ground – and the brakes didn’t work either.
A quick trip back to the drawing board saw Mitchell sort out the defective anchors, install a rigid fork assembly, forgo the rear shock for a solid piece of billet, and fortify the frame. He also removed the option to lift the stabilisers altogether, likening the process of trying to ride the Super-Farthing on two wheels alone to “suicide with extra steps”.
After that, to give the Super-Farthing some semblance of handling, Mitchell knocked up a hydraulic power steering system, using handlebar mounted buttons to guide his creation left and right.
With that, take two saw greater success at a top speed of 50mph achieved, inspiring plans to venture further afield and up the ante with the now four-wheeler.
‘It’s just like a tall quad’
Although no longer road legal due to the fitment of a non-pneumatic front tyre, Mitchell says he now hopes to run the Super-Farthing up to much higher speeds.
“I was originally thinking I would ride it once and then never again, but it’s actually nowhere near as bad as you would think. With the stabilisers down, it’s just like riding a really tall quadbike.
“You’d have a job trying to get it to tip over in a corner because the weight is all low down in the swingarm and front wheel.
“So far, I’ve only managed to get about 50mph out of it, but that was on a short stretch of road. It’ll definitely do more though.
“I’ll need to find somewhere bigger to get some more practise in because it’s so different to riding anything else.
“I’d like to ride it somewhere totally flat where I can try it without the hydraulics, because trying to steer it with buttons is not the best, as you can imagine, especially at speed.
“It’s geared for about 140-something – I don’t think I’ll get anywhere near that, but this summer I want to take it to a track and we’ll see what it can do.”
Go to youtube.com/@Gregulations to see the crazy machine in action.