>>voidUp+Zj
The head was almost certainly milled out of a blank made on a lathe. Something like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/Yf-twqgWZQ8

>>gnabgi+(OP)
Reminded me of the "shim" discussion about BMW motorcycles and part authenticity from the 1974 classic "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance": http://www.hilarygallo.com/the-zen-shim-question/

>>gnabgi+(OP)
Wouldn't circumventing trademark lockouts like this be fair use under "Sega v. Accolade"[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

>>jacque+az
You can make anything on anything. Doesn't make it smart tho.

If this were a production run of a few dozen super high grade aerospace donkey dicks with five shoulders and four pockets, an oil channel, a precisely engineered break point and a 12-step heat treat process I'd say yeah, make it on your Swiss lathe with live tooling or bajillion axis VMC or whatever.

But this looks to be a simple small, probably cosmetic or otherwise low-ish strength stainless or chromed fastener that BMW probably wants a few hundred thousand of. You'll be time, money, labor, frustration, managerial nitpicking, just about everything, ahead to just have the fastener industry and their existing expertise make it for you. The "bespoke" drive, the custom branding, those are all known-knowns to those guys. They'll whip up tooling for their screw machines and fill the same bucket in 1/20th of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJvQZko8uiU

Edit: replaced video link with better one. Obviously there's fiddle fucking around they're not showing and they're mix and matching footage of different products but the speed things move once you've got it all set up is broadly accurate. A whole bunch of these steps would be skipped or altered for a stainless fastener.

>>voidUp+Zj
Unlike all the other guesses here, I actually do have experience with manufacturing specialty aerospace fasteners similar in size, shape, complexity, and precision as these. These are most assuredly being manufactured on a specialty tool called a “Swissing Lathe”, or Swiss CNC machine, because that is the machine you always use to make parts like this. It is a multi-headed turret mill combined with a lathe that can continuously feed a piece of long bar stock and continually spit out fasteners. They were invented many years ago to produce extremely high precision small screws for watches, and in fact Citizen is one of the main vendors of these tools to this day. Based on my experience I would expect the cycle time for making this part to be 30 seconds or so.

Here’s a good video that eli5’s the difference between a Swiss screw machine and conventional CNC.

https://youtu.be/y3y0tATB0lg?si=pkYDT3BV0-6C-aq5

And here’s a video with a high quality soundtrack that shows how the machine combines automatic lathe cuts, mill cuts, and thread rolling without changing machines, swapping cutters, or re-fixturing the work.

https://youtu.be/MPAK5I1HJAw?si=fnMmjDp6ydYSDbfH

And if you need some specialty fasteners made and have an unlimited budget I can reccomed these folks.

https://centrix-us.com/

>>burnt-+Bv
I suppose that depends on your definition of “now”. BMW has had a 20 year history of fork lower failures on their adventure bikes. Just search “BMW Fork Failure” and you will find a lot of discussion. Here was a Microsoft friend’s wreck in Alaska, which I believe was one of the earliest ones. Front wheel complete separated while she was riding straight and level on a paved road.

https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/crash-in-destruction-bay-...

>>voidUp+Zj
The prototypes might be milled and/or produced via additive manufacturing (3D printing.) In production the heads are likely formed via stamping. Here's an old video I remember watching as a kid (Unfortunately quite pixelated) of the Robertson screw being manufactured which has a tapered square profile for the bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td7GjAMAY7Y (The Acme School of Stuff was awesome for its time and still is.)

>>gnabgi+(OP)
Think we can get it with existing SP10 bit or “clutch” shaped bits?

Fiber optics bit https://www.qocese.com/product-p-381399.html

Magnetic Spanner bit https://www.amazon.com/Magnetic-Security-Screwdriver-Electro...

Clutch bit https://www.amazon.com/Clutch-Vintage-American-Steel-Sizes/d...

>>burnt-+kl3
Is 2025-10-15 recent enough?

https://www.rideapart.com/news/776212/bmw-r1300rt-cardan-sha...

>>gnabgi+(OP)
Seems to be in line with BMW's enshitification moves they've made regarding Home Assistant. I actually have an X5 that was affected by this & it will be the last BMW I ever own.

https://alerts.home-assistant.io/alerts/bmw_connected_drive/

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1n8tidg/bmw_...