at his workshop
A trained car mechanic, Michael Hüby had been working for 10 years as a journalist when he first visited Nashville from his native Germany in 2006. Little did he know he’d meet the love of his life, makeup artist Rachel Dwyer.
Before long, he moved here to be with her. If Hüby had any lingering doubts about his new home, they vanished when he met Jeff Lane, founder of the Lane Motor Museum, through a friend. The museum specializes in unique and historically significant cars — some of them one-of-a-kind. Hüby was becoming particularly adept at metalwork while indulging his real passion, building motorcycles from scratch, so Lane hired him to work on one of the museum’s vehicles. Lane was so pleased with the work he offered Hüby a job.
“It’s absolutely great,” Hüby says. “The museum is a giant playground for the restoration team and provides us the opportunity to do really good, period-correct restorations.”
When Hüby’s not working at the museum, he can usually be found in his home workshop in Southeast Nashville, which looks like it could be the props department for a Mad Max movie. There, under the company name Music City Metalcraft, he builds custom bikes, restores old ones, and fabricates all manner of metal parts.
In one room sits NOSfearatu, a bike he built about 15 years ago that’s won numerous races and bike shows in Europe, and been featured in magazines worldwide. “It’s turbocharged, nitrous-injected. It’s got about 250 horsepower, and about 1,000 hours of work in it,” Hüby explains.
In the main workspace are the tools of his trade: mallets, sandbags, a pneumatic planishing hammer and something known as an English wheel. Nearby sits his latest project — a lean, menacing machine he’s building for a ride in June called the Ozark Mountain Scramble. “The frame, the engine, the base bike you use has to be from before 1980,” he says. “It has to be below 750cc. And below $1,000 total for the whole bike. In order to build something really special, you basically have to make everything from scratch.”
Meanwhile, back at the museum, he’s hard at work on his toughest project yet. “It’s called the Gyro X,” he says. “It’s a two-wheel car, like a motorcycle, but car-size, and it’s got a gyroscope to keep it upright when it’s standing still.” The vehicle was the brainchild of Alex Tremulis, the legendary car designer behind the Tucker Torpedo and other ahead-of-the-curve vehicles.
But when the museum got the car, nearly everything was gone, including the drivetrain and gyroscope. “There were no plans, no blueprints, nothing,” Hüby says. “We only had a couple of pictures. You have to basically extrapolate from the pictures how it would work, because no one knew.”
Hüby says the Gyro X has been his most challenging project yet. Of course, that may change soon — he and his wife are expecting their first child later this month.
