I am heavily into motorbikes, as well as heraldry. I wondered whether anyone had come across a depiction of a motorcycle in arms or crest? This leads me on to something else I have muse on. How could modern equipment/machinery be depicted heraldicly?

Other than the badges of private clubs, I’ve never seen a coat of arms that depicted any form of motorcycle.

I would think that there would be some way to represent the idea of a motorcycle by way of using counterchanged shapes and/or partitions. After all the College of Arms was able to illustrate a symbolic piano keyboard for Sir Elton John without resorting to a mechanical drawing.

There’s no rule against representing modern machinery with a realistic drawing of it; early 20th century English armory is full of depictions of things like locomotives, while many civic arms on the Continent have things like mine derricks, tractors, and so on.  Airplanes and rockets also appear here and there.

That said, such depictions tend to make for boring and cluttered heraldry.  It is generally considered better heraldic practice to do what David suggests, representing a modern thing abstractly through creative use of partition lines and ordinaries, or by finding a medieval implement that can be related to the modern one and depicting it in a modern way.  Not that I have any good ideas at hand on how to do that for a motorcycle.

The winged wheel has been a symbol, both military and civilian, of motorcycling for a long time. Maybe there’d be a way to represent that heraldically?

or a hog between 2 wheels as a reference to harley davidson.