The airplane, the cash register, the stepladder, the parking meter and the pop top beverage can are all inventions that came from Dayton. You can now add boatorcycle to the list with Dayton resident Austin Bentoski’s street-legal combination of a watercraft and a scooter.
Perhaps you’ve seen the curious looking vehicle cruising around East Dayton. Part jet ski and part scooter, you might have thought to yourself, what?
“Well, I figured what’s the dumbest thing I could do,” said 25-year-old Austin Bentoski.
He’s washing his creation in the driveway of the Riverside home that he rents with friends.
“It’s been done before. Like there is a group of people that make little scooters and put a jet ski on it and they’ll go like 15 - 20 miles an hour on it down the road. I was like, naw I want to go down the highway, I want to travel. I want to make people smile when they see it going down the road."
Bentoski definitely leaves smiles in his wake when riding his boatorcycle. That’s what he likes to call it. He says that the hybrid bike is “a head turner. A lot of motorcycles have an issue with being seen on the road. That’s not my problem.”
Bentoski got the jet ski for a couple hundred bucks. Then he stripped the engine out of the fiberglass shell and mounted a 600 cc scooter to the jet ski body.
“I cut a big ol’ hole in the bottom and made my own mounting points, did a little bit of welding to make some metal brackets to connect to,“ Bentoski said, looking over the bike. “Then slapped some turn signals, brake lights and all of that, and it’s street legal.”
How fast does it go? Bentoski has gotten it up to 70mph.
“It was scary the first time,” he said. “I had all my protective gear, I was ready. I’ve got the classic bright orange, one strap around the back. I wear that with my helmet and my motorcycle gear.”
The body of the wet bike is pretty wide so it’s really awkward looking when Bentoski comes to a stop.
“Right now it’s so big and unwieldy that I’ve got to scoot almost entirely off the seat and then hang my leg over and tippy toe it,” he said. “ There’s actually a pull thing where the jet ski used to be able to go in reverse. I’m going to make, like, a kickstand that comes down the back with little wheels, little tiny training wheels, and I’ll be able to put those down when I come to a stop sign or stop light.”
Bentoski ducked into the house to put some shoes on and grab his helmet so that he can take it for a spin around the block.
The boatorcycle starts up like an angry lawnmower. It takes a little maneuvering for Bentoski to back out of the driveway and into the street. When he revs the engine and takes off down the residential street, his neighbors come out onto their front porches to watch.
The unique bike gets attention even when parked in the driveway, like when his neighbors stop by. Celeste Nobel lives two doors down from Bentoski and loves the bike. Nobel brought her friend Levena Sprude over to take pictures. “My husband repairs motorcycles, ski doo’s anything really, and I wanted to get a picture to show him,” Sprude says looking over the boatorcycle.
“I just love to see the smiles and laughs and the jaw drops. People leaning out the window going oh, my gosh!,” Bentoski laughed. “I’m an ambassador for a ridershare.com program with motorcycles, where you basically get to rent motorcycles out to each other, like airbnb. So my plan is to actually list this once I got it done and safe for other people to ride, make it easier. I’m going to put it on there and let people have a chance to ride it themselves if they want.”
Nothing about this was easy,” Bentoski added. “But it was fun. It was fun making it.”
