Describing his 1967 Jeep Commando as a “survivor [he] came-across,” and himself as its caretaker, Alex Earle has a duty-of-care to the vehicles in his custodianship many would envy. Proof that if you see a car in the street that speaks to you you should always put a card on the windshield, Alex purchased the Commando in just such a way from a guy in Santa Monica, and then went about bringing it back to life. He also turned it into the perfect truck to haul around another of his mechanical passions, namely the 1994 Ducati M900 also featured in this week’s film.
Described by himself as a “volumetric study … far more akin to the design of a car,” and built up over a period of many years, Alex’s M900 would go on to inform his career when the company he worked for acquired Ducati, bringing full-circle one of his greatest passions in life: designing motorcycles.
Upon acquiring the M900, Alex began a process of shedding the extraneous bits, cutting to its essence and ending up with a rather bare, utilitarian machine that complements the Jeep that hauls it around. Speaking of the Jeep, it came into Alex’s possession in a rather rough state, but importantly, it retained its factory spec, and showed no evidence of aftermarket gear or otherwise non-OEM replacement parts whatsoever. It was easy to work on in this sense—there were no major surprises once he started digging into the restoration—but the process of getting it to today’s condition was still an extensive one.
While the Jeep was put back to a recognizable factory style, the Ducati that’s often seen through the rear window was a different story. In the very early 2000s, Alex stripped the bike down to begin its transformation into what you see today. It was a process that took years worth of time designing and fabricating the new look, and as you can see in the film, it wasn’t just built to be looked at.
