Order an Oset 24.0 Racing electric trials motorcycle drop-shipped to your door and you get this:
three cardboard boxes. One giant, one a little bigger than a car battery, another that’s a little flat, like you ordered a pair of flip-flops. Inside is everything you need to assemble a rad little ripper of a machine.

We’re here building this bike for a very specific reason—and a fairly specific person: me. Much as I love riding in the dirt, I’m terrible at it. Specifically, I’m terrible at the high-precision, slow-speed technical riding that’s exemplified by the discipline of competitive trials. And until the arrival of the Oset, there was no sign of improvement on the horizon.

Riding in the dirt is a tall order for me these days. I’m a new dad, for a start. And I live in the geographic center of Los Angeles, one of the more famously sprawling cities on the planet. So while quick escapes to pavement are numerous, loading up a truck or a van with a dirt bike and driving three hours to a decent riding OHV area is a big ask of the family. Disappearing long enough to get good at it, or practicing my dirt bike chops in my own neighborhood? Well, that’d get me shot.

But the electric motorcycle revolution might just have my back, and the Oset 24.0 Racing might, might, be a perfect tool for sorting out some of those missing skills. If you’ve seen Motorcyclist contributor Chris Northover’s gobsmacking Storm the Embassy video on YouTube, you’ll know that these little machines can take an astonishing amount of punishment, while delivering fairly spectacular performance. All at a neighborhood-friendly decibel level. That’s no small task.

So we’re trying out an Oset 24.0. It’ll be a long-term project. The machine and I, both. We’ll challenge its performance, and my skills. And we’ll have some actual talent in the form of our own Andrew Oldar, a professional dirt bike stud and trials expert, coaching and evaluating me along the way.

But first, we have a bike to build.