Three and Easy

It had never been done before: a motorcycle with two wheels in front. Even the head of Western Washington University’s Vehicle Research Institute, one of the top schools for vehicle design, said it wasn’t possible. “That was just about all the incentive I needed,” says Bob Mighell '85, TH'86, who in 2005 turned an inexpensive Honda Rebel into a three-wheeler, also known as a trike. “I took it to the local motorcycle show. I spent the whole day there, talking about the bike. I realized, ‘Hey, this might be a business!’ ” A decade later Mighell is the CEO of Tilting Motor Works, the company behind the trike that helped him break the land speed record for a three-wheel motorcycle. Twice.

Mighell, who grew up in Seattle, was riding motorcycles by age 12. At 18 he made his first cross-country ride, all the way to Hanover. He studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth but says he learned as much about his craft by watching his father—a Dartmouth ’52—fix VW bugs in their garage. After graduating, Mighell married, had three sons, earned his M.B.A. at the University of Washington and spent the next 25 years in the medical industry. But motorcycles never stopped being his thing. “A lot of guys will ride motorcycles when they’re younger, get married, have kids and the spouse says, ‘You gotta get rid of the motorcycle!’ A lot of guys do. I never did. I used to pick up my kids from grade school on the back of my motorcycle.”

His bolt-on replacement front end for Harleys and Hondas, which is on backorder for at least six months and costs about $10,000, recently landed Mighell an interview on Jay Leno’s Garage. Last year he met a retired VP from Harley Davidson: “Unbeknownst to me they spent several million dollars developing [a trike] and gave up. I met this guy. He’s sitting on my bike and before he even asked, he fired up the motorcycle and took off. He comes back, parks the bike. He has a great big smile and says, ‘That’s what we were trying to build.’ ”

Abigail Drachman-Jones ’03