Vibrazioni Art Design isn’t known for building motorcycles. It’s recognized for building cool furniture out of old 55 gallon oil drums, the way half the bands in Jamaica built their drum kits. But when they turned their attention to building a cafe racer, the results were fantastic.

The other cool thing about this bike is that nobody really does anything with BMW K-bikes. In stark opposition to the traditional air-cooled, horizontally opposed Boxer twins that BMW used since the 1930s, when the K Series rolled around in the 1980s, it was powered by a water-cooled, inline four-cylinder that was essentially BMW’s smallest car engine turned on its side. The engine itself was known as The Flying Brick.

They were strong, reliable and as boring as a CSPAN marathon; the kind of motorcycles that people who watch CSPAN would actually ride, while wearing a suit and tie with a copy of the Wall Street Journal in the hard panniers. A handful of early K-Bikes have a collector’s following. People seem to like the narrower, smaller, sportier three-cylinder K75S, and the Hans Muth-styled K1 is a collector’s item mostly because it looks like it came off the set of Walt Disney’s Tron. Your ordinary, run of the mill K100RS, though? Not exactly what you’d use as fodder for a cool cafe racer.

But leave it to the Italians to come up with something absolutely killer.

Alberto Dassasso and Riccardo Zanobini — who kind of look like the two-wheeled, greasy pawed equivalent of Daft Punk in their welding helmets — set their recycling sights on a K100RS they found for sale locally, and commenced stripping all the fiberglass and plastic off of it, along with the aluminum fuel tank.

Like the endurance racers of the 1970s, they wanted to build a bike that had a hand-hammered fairing, and their mission was to create all the bodywork — fairing, side panels, bumstop seat and fuel tank — out of a single oil drum.

Pretty much everything bolted on it has been stripped off and replaced with something simple. The gauges were replaced by a single speedometer, the fenders, tailpiece and luggage rack are gone, and the headlight was replaced by a single spotlamp mounted on the side.

What you’re left with is the engine, the subframe and the single-sided swingarm at the rear. It’s a badass creation that you only need to look at once to start building in your own head.

Image Source: VibrazioniArtDesign.com, Silodrome.com