Moved into airplane hangar. Now fabricates whimsical vehicles
To see Mark’s living setup within the hangar: 13:30
Mark’s famous BMW motorcycle build: 3:30
Non-tangible menial work alienates, whereas learning a trade can bring (meaningful) joy. Mark Atkinson turned his passion into work as a skilled machinist, making custom vehicles & plane parts in his live-work hangar.
Mark “makr” Atkinson spent his youth learning to fix engines (of his father’s classic car) and rebuild motorcycles. Later, he taught himself welding and fabrication and set a landspeed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats on a bike he’d built. Today, he fabricates nearly everything in his life, even his bed and furniture that sit in the loft above his workshop (in an airplane hangar in Salt Lake City’s Skypark).
One winter when the Bonneville races had been canceled, Atkinson found the work of Turkish industrial designer Mehmet Doruk Erdem and built the BMW Alpha: a one-of-a-kind shark-nosed land speed racer. A couple years later an engineer approached him asking for advice: “We make this really great electric motorcycle, but we’re not selling them, where are we going wrong and I said, ‘You’re putting a gas tank on an electric bike. I think you’ve missed your opportunity to do something really great. You’ve got a clean slate, essentially 1880s when we started building motorcycles in the first place. You can do anything you want and you’ve chosen to do what we’ve already done.