Shape Shifting Cat

After nine years in development, this Panther purrs through all terrains with a design that will never leave your side.

The U.S. military was having trouble finding a bike. According to Erik Brinkman, chairman of the Denver, CO-based Panther Motorcycles, motorcycles hadn’t played a role in the military since World War II. The military was looking for something rugged, a bike that could navigate narrow paths on crumbling mountainsides; a solution to replace the mules currently serving terrains that were impossible for Humvees and other vehicles to navigate. 

Brinkman’s first thought was to build a simple multi-fuel, bullet proof stainless steel design. The idea was to make a vehicle that doesn’t make tradeoffs, a bike that could fend off overheating under the desert sun and still be able to limp home if the oil tank runs dry – the shape-shifting Panther R-Bike was born.

“It will get home on a dry engine,” says Brinkman. “It won’t put out a lot of power. The on-board computer will keep it from overheating, and it will drop the power way down but you will get home.”

The 750cc and 1,000cc Panther R-Bikes, as well as its 500cc Cub counterpart, are set to hit the consumer market by the end of 2010. The 750cc and 1,000cc can be customized to feature, among other specifications, a regular engine, a Hemi, a turbo Hemi or a turbo diesel.

“The idea was that the bike would take you wherever you wanted to go and back,” Brinkman adds. “[The Middle East] has open deserts and tight areas, and if I had a kid over there, I don’t think that I’d want him on a mule.”

Every now and then something comes out of an R&D department and goes on to become the staple of a new company — or the patent is sold, depending on the technology. The development team behind the Panther R-Bike resides at IDS Research, a Canadian company that specializes in the design and development of medical and transportation technologies. Brinkman was a director at IDS and a part of the 4 developers who had a hand in bringing the nine-years-in-the-making concept to fruition.

The body work on the Panther is Kevlar. A rider can drop it on the road or fire a rifle at it without damaging the body. The company uses a Kevlar-carbon-fiber overlay that is then placed in a high-density polyethylene-polyolefin mix. High-density polyethylene is bulletproof without Kevlar, making the body stronger than the panels on a Humvee.

The fact that the motorcycle shape-shifts makes the design more unusual — considering its ability to shape-shift while in motion. The driver’s upper torso remains in the same position when the bike shifts, so the perspective stays the same

“It’s a lifetime motorcycle, it’s not made to be something you keep for three years and sell,” Brinkman says regarding his rugged design choices. “When you’re talking cobalt-tungsten-alloy engine parts, and nano-diamond-coated transmission gears, you’re looking at something that you can keep for a good 40 years before you send it back to us to have us rebuild it. It’s a different approach to a bike.”

Heart Of The Beast

The Panther features a push-rod engine, because Brinkman found it “sturdy, easy to work on and dead reliable.” The engine is capable of putting out a lot of power while maintaining a low center of gravity.

The ends of the adjustable push rods and roller rockers are coated with a proprietary flexible ceramic material that is also used to line the inside of the cylinder.

The piston, rod and crank shaft are each machined out of tungsten-cobalt alloy — the same alloy used in jet combustion chambers. “[The alloy] is hard to work with and tool, but it doesn’t expand when it gets hot,” Brinkman notes on his attraction to the alloy’s physical properties. “You just have to cool the alloy down really well when you are making parts out of it, because it will get so hard that it just becomes really difficult to work.”

Because the material doesn’t expand, the Panther’s tolerances remain a tight fit even when the engine is cold.

Brinkman attests to the Panther’s staying power. “There is not a rusting piece of metal, in or out, anywhere on this bike,” he says. “You can park it in the barn for 20 years, come back, put the fluids in it and it will go.”

The American Standard Transmission features 3” gears with a diamond-like coating (DLC). Big bikes typically use 2¼” gears, but Brinkman was attracted to 3”, because they can take more abrupt changes in power and last longer. Throughout the design process, the project’s seemingly oft-repeated motto was “I just don’t want to worry about anything.” The heart of the beast is chain driven, and the sprockets are also near-diamond coated.

The same is true for the clutch. Normally a clutch features five or seven plates; the Panther uses a 20-plate clutch. Instead of steel and fiber, the plates are ceramic with Kevlar on each side, so they don’t warp or wear out.

The lighting on the bike is entirely LED. Because the motorcycle was created, in part, to be used in off-road scenarios, bulb-breaking is expected and a standard headlight wouldn’t last, according to Brinkman. The headlight adjusts up and down as the bike shape-shifts, and tilt halfway, so when the operator steers right, the headlight pans or tilts right using a proprietary new method.  

The constant as-you-go on-board diagnostics monitor the entire bike. It notifies the user if the brakes are hot or if the oil is old. It even sends notifications if fasteners or other hardware is coming loose.

Panther Motorcycles recently invested in a new $1 million x-ray machine for quality control. As the bikes come off the line, they are run through the machine to check for voids in the castings or micro cracks in any of the parts.

“When the bikes leave the factory, they have to be perfect,” Brinkman adds. “If I’m giving a six-year, 60,000-mile warranty on a bike and I screw up, it will cost me millions.”

Shape-Shifting

A spring-loaded thumbwheel on the left side of the handlebars operates the shape-shifting function. The rider actually has the ability to change the bike’s type while driving. 

“When you’re on the highway, you stretch it out. When you get on the exit ramp, you pull it in a bit,” says Brinkman.

When the bike is “standing up,” or compactly shifted in, the rider has 80” of suspension travel. When it’s lying down or stretched out, the suspension becomes more sensitive — the shocks automatically adjust according to load. An additional thumbwheel on the throttle side adjusts the power level. When the bike is on the highway, the rider can drop the power level down to 25 percent to increase mileage. 

The power current from the engine changes during the shape-shift. The computer senses the shift, and as the bike shortens, the torque curve moves to the lower end of the RPM range; as you lengthen the bike, the torque curve changes to midrange.

The entire bike is capable of folding up to be able to fit in the back of a pickup truck. The handlebars tuck in, permitting users to put it up against the wall in the garage to save space.

For Brinkman, it all boils down to keeping it easy. “There’s nothing worse than having a bike take up half of the space of a car,” Brinkman says. “You fight with your [significant other] for the garage space as it is.”

Wheel installation is significantly different than other bikes as well. The bike comes with three sets of wheels: street, off-road or Enduro wheels. Each set only takes five pins and one nut to install. Compared to having five nuts alone, tires can now be changed in around five minutes.

Low Pollution

“We’re in the middle of a patent. We’re doing a brand-new approach to exhaust,” says Brinkman. “The thing is that the EPA and its European equivalent are all a bunch of lawyers, right? They just say that all bikes should be water-cooled by this point, which I refuse to do because I want to keep it simple. To me, the owner has to be able to tinker. You don’t truly bond with your bike until you’ve wrenched on it. The military doesn’t want it either because one bullet and you’re down.”

A little skirt at the exhaust port keeps the valve seating properly to keep heat away from it. A sharp bend is placed 3¼” from the valve to create a hot spot, which helps any residual fuel burn. After that, it heads to the catalytic converter. At this hot spot there’s a fresh air feed pumping in fresh oxygen that goes directly into the catalytic converter and up under the seats. But before it goes under the seats, the Panther has another fresh air injection to help cool the exhaust down.

The exhaust pipe runs right by the oil tank. Under the seat, there is a combination of a muffler and resonator. The resonator has two knobs on it, one for volume, one for tone. Owners can adjust the bike to sound anyway they like.

“If you’re getting on your bike early in the morning to go to work, you want it nice and quiet,” Brinkman adds about the feature. “You don’t want to disturb your neighbors. But in traffic, you want a little noise for safety.”

The bike has four different fuel filtration filters, three of which include a water filter, a wax filter and a regular fuel filter. The bike was built for traveling anywhere in the world that the rider wants to go, and the map still contains a few places where you never know exactly what is going into the fuel tank.

The Panther is the culmination of nine years of hard work, 42 like minds and the addition of an estimated 1,200 employees in the next four years with additional operations coming to Denver, Europe and two factories in Asia.

“We used to be based in Victoria, British Columbia, but the best people are all over the planet and you can’t get them to come to one place like the old WWII company model,” Brinkman says. “You don’t need that now with the Internet, video conferencing, etc. I tell my people to be wherever they want to be.”