Indian Motorcycle has revealed the Roland Sands Design (RSD) Indian Scout build in the latest episode of the Forged custom video series as Roland Sands and his fabricator, Aaron Boss, present the bike to its new owner, Joshua Dun, drummer for the American band Twenty One Pilots.

The first of three creations by renowned builders creating unique customs around the all-new Indian Scout platform, the RSD Indian Scout is a testament to that which Roland Sands Design does best, taking cruisers and turning them into high-performance bikes.

“What makes an RSD bike is taking a machine and elevating it,” said Roland Sands. “We’ve always taken cruisers and made them into sport bikes. This bike has that RSD silhouette, but the cool thing was how easy it was to make the new Scout fit the RSD mould.”

With each Forged build rooted in a historical figure, machine, or era of inspiration taken from Scout’s storied 100+ year history, RSD quickly selected Ed ‘Iron Man’ Kretz as the inspiration for their build. With his attitude of never giving up, which led to his nickname, and as a builder of many high-performance Indian Motorcycle race bikes, the RSD team felt a natural affinity with Kretz.

“It was like, well, OK, what would Ed build today? A rowdy race bike.” Sands commented.

Bringing the ‘Iron Man’ racing spirit to the 2025 Sport Scout, RSD took advantage of their vast experience of making Scout and FTR flat track racers to build a performance street bike Kretz would be proud of.

For enhanced ride and handling, the Sport Scout’s front end was adapted and upgraded to FTR front forks and triple clamps with high-performance braking achieved with the switch to dual discs and radial-mount Brembo brake calipers. Similarly, the rear end was modified to accept an FTR swingarm mated to Indian piggyback shocks and a Brembo rear caliper. Connecting the performance suspension and braking to the street, the RSD Scout now runs on 17-inch wheels by RSD Dymag with stickier Dunlop Sportmax Q5s rubber allowing the full potential of the upgrades to be exploited.

Aaron Boss said, “From there, it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that such as modifying the front fairing to hook onto the new forks and modifying the stock foot controls for a more street bike riding position. With the engine dialled in from the factory already, I fabricated a full custom titanium exhaust and the basis of the tail was the original design of RSD’s flat track tail for previous generation Scouts. But we’ve amped it up with new sides and an undertail tyre hugger.”

Finished with custom seat from Saddlemen and a bold black and yellow colour scheme, there was one last touch in dedication to Ed Kretz. Staring defiantly back from under the tail is the image of Sylvester the cat that the team found in the archives on Kretz’s business card during the first episode of the series.

Relatively new to the world of motorcycles, Dun had previously ridden an FTR and had chosen a Scout Bobber for his first bike.

“Walking into that bike shop for the first time, I was pretty much a blank canvas. in terms of like, what’s my style? What do I like? So I walked around, looked at everything and kind of narrowed it down to two bobber-style bikes. Ultimately, I was just like, it’s gotta be the Indian Scout.”

On first seeing the RSD Scout, Josh Dun was immediately impressed. “Wow. This thing’s perfect. The colours are perfect,” Dun said. “This whole thing makes sense. And I think that my intuition was right, that, you know, the brand and the people behind Indian Motorcycle are just a cool group of people.”

“The reason why I’m building bikes is to excite other people,” said Boss. “And he came in and his jaw dropped. He paused for a second, speechless. That’s when you know you’ve got him and he’s excited about it.

“100% it’s a bike that I would personally own,” said Sands. “How do you design a bike that makes you feel like a badass? I think that’s the formula right there.”