Tons of material headed your way from features to techs to wild industry reports. Chris Callen stepped up with a report on his Cycle Source publishing efforts.
In the meantime join your local motorcycle rights group and ride fast and free.
Let’s hit the news. There’s actually a bunch of solid good stuff happening.
Whether riding a motorcycle or challenging norms, Gevin Fax is no stranger to blazing trails.
She says, “I think this is the best, most wonderful country in the world, but we are not flawless. I want women to not sell themselves short. We are stronger than we give ourselves credit for. We are more possible than we could ever imagine.”
“Everybody kept telling me my life was going to change after I bought the Harley. Let me tell you something: Everything changed.”
K.Randall Ball kicks off the first chapter of Stolen Motorcycle Files – Exclusively on Bikernet.com
READ Episode One now !!!
The Sundance Meeting by K.Randall Ball
Three brothers rode into Sundance, Wyoming on their way to Sturgis in late July, hell bent to make their 20th run to the Badlands.
The small town, population just over a grand, was a mere 52 flying miles from the Rally. They rode long and hard for almost 400 miles, and this could be the final watering hole stop before the last blast on interstate 90 into Sturgis, South Dakota.
Sundance located in the bare open plains of Wyoming was named after the Sun Dance ceremony practiced by several American Indian tribes.
When it comes to motorcycles, there is a lot of tacky stuff out there.
We wanted to create some motorcycle-related Halloween photos that weren’t hokey and share them with you all.
Several of us donned some classic movie monster costumes and enjoyed some time in a local graveyard…
Frankenstein (Tyler), Bride of Frankenstein (Amanda) with a 1975 Harley Shovelhead chopper and and a Werewolf (Todd) on his Triumph bobber.
We hope you enjoy them!
PS – We’ve been putting small posters of one of these photos (as well as some candy) in Lowbrow Customs orders all month, and will keep doing so until we run out!
Chopper builder Patrick, a Member of South Side MC.
A follow-up to our article on Long Fork Run. Southside MC Est 88 Sweden member Patrick’s cool choppers are featured here.
Patrick: “When I built Suicide Machine, I was introduced to stainless which has become a material that I prefer to build my parts as much as possible. So on the white chopper I have made oil tank, flatfender, tripple Trees, barney legs, sissybar, controls, exhaust and lots of smaller details in stainless steel.”
Motorcycles and freedom are two notions that are most often associated with the American way of life. Responsible for the former are the local bike makers, of course, with Harley-Davidson playing a big part. As for the latter, well, it’s the way Americans chose to build and run their society.
These two notions have spread fast around the world, and you don’t need us to tell you that, at least as far as freedom goes. But you might need us to find out about the countless motorcycle builders out there that take a lot of inspiration from American motorcycles when doing their own projects.
For more than a year now, we’ve traveled virtually around Europe to uncover custom motorcycle projects based on Harley-Davidson bikes. We found most of them in Germany, where many custom shops exist, but there are incredible ideas coming from elsewhere as well.
Like, say Poland, where a shop by the name BTChoppers resides. Like a lot of other European businesses of its kind, it too got recognition from the land of Harley-Davidson, and the bike maker itself.
Back in 2011, for instance, during the AMD World Championships in Sturgis, South Dakota, Harley awarded the Pick of Excellence title to a BTChoppers build. That would be the one we have here, aptly titled Bit of Freedom.
The bike is a custom build from the ground up, meaning it uses a fully custom frame inside, in which a Harley-Davidson shovelhead engine sits cradled.
It was the minimalist style of this bike and the perfectly matching, retro-styled paint job in Red Dark Crimson and gold that caught our eye and made us bring it back into the spotlight as the perfect opener of the broader coverage of the BTChoppers bikes coming our way over the next few months.
So, if you fancy Polish-made bikes with a twist of America, stay close.
When talking about the exploits of that European Harley-Davidson custom shop by the name Thunderbike, we’re usually treated with reinterpreted modern motorcycles. Occasionally, we also get full custom builds, based on their own frames, and somewhat rarer, conversions of earlier Harleys.
The Flying Shovel, as the one we have here is called, is part of that last category. Originally a 1957 Harley-Davidson FL, it was transformed into something the shop describes as a “true old-school Bobber with rigid frame, but reliable engine.”
What you see before your eyes is the frame of the FL, wrapped around an S&S shovelhead engine. The powerplant is linked to 4-speed gearbox from RevTech and topped by an S7S Super E carburetor also from S&S. The powertrain spins 18-inch wheels of Thunderbike make.
Other than the engine and frame, many of the other parts on this build have been custom-made for it exclusively. We’re talking about things like the exhaust, handlebars, grips, pegs, fuel tank, oil tank, rear fender, all of which have been designed specifically with the Flying Shovel in mind.
Some of these parts, made in brass, were wrapped in nickel, or given an old-finish look to have the appearance the bike belongs to another age, and for the most part, the shop succeeded.
In all, there were around 30 custom bits and pieces that made it into this two-wheeler, but because most were specifically designed for this project, very few of them are available commercially. That means it is extremely difficult to estimate how much it cost to put this thing together, and as usual Thunderbike makes no mention of the cost.
The Flying Shovel was built for a customer, and sadly the world lost track of it since it was completed about three years ago.
Not that long ago, we ran a story about a customized Breakout called Stella. The work of German custom shop Thunderbike, the motorcycle was the perfect opportunity for me to state that Harley does not give bikes girl names.
And it doesn’t. Go as far back as you like in the history of the company, and you’ll see mostly male names, or names that are generally associated with males: Road King, Street Bob, Cross Bones, Iron, and so on.
But Harley riders do give their bikes girl names. That was made clear to me almost immediately by the comments posted on the Stella story, with people saying their Harley bikes have names, not designations, and these names include stuff like Belladonna, Jolene, Delilah, Dolly, Scarlet, or Christine. Someone even said he likes to call his bike Mazikeen (that’s for you Lucifer fans out there).
Back in June, when the world was in full lockdown, and there was no hope of bike shows to be held in-person, 60 builders from 10 countries showed their creations online as part of Harley-Davidson’s The No Show. Among them was North Carolina resident Billy Childress.
His build, a 1981 Shovelhead, is yet another proof that builders and riders like to think of their bikes as being females (maybe Harley should take notice). It’s called Linda, taking the name of the builder’s mother.
Like many projects of its kind, this one, too, was designed with the fuel tank at its core. Starting from that, Childress sourced the rest of the parts and started putting the bike together, from the wheels that make the connection to the ground to the straight exhaust pipe pieced together out of four other pipes, and of course, the Shovelhead engine fitted inside the frame.
Like all other builders in the show, Childress was given a couple of minutes to show his creation and you can watch his presentation in the video attached below.
Given all the lockdowns and social distancing measures ordered in place for most of the year, motorcycle shows got canceled or postponed just like everything else. Trying to save face and give custom shops across America a means to vent off steam, Harley-Davidson created The No Show event back in June.
Held online on Instagram and Youtube, it was the perfect opportunity for some 60 builders from 10 countries to show their latest or best creations, builds that would have otherwise risked sinking into oblivion in 2020.
As you might expect, most of the shops taking part tried their best to advocate the projects being presented, describing in detail and at times using big words the two-wheelers we were seeing. But not Tennessee-resident Rusty Perkins, the man behind this here 1968 Shovelhead.
If you thought the title of this piece is some personal opinion on the build, you were wrong. These are the words the builder himself uses to describe the motorcycle: “nothing real special about it, simple, the way I like ‘em.”
And that statement pretty much sums up the American custom motorcycle scene: a great two-wheeler is not what the onlooker wants or expects, but what the builder/owner thinks it’s right.
As all the others in the series, Perkins was given a little over two minutes to present his bike. He uses most of them to give us a seemingly bored rundown of the motorcycle (available in the video below), without actually saying anything about it.
He does reveal the bike was built over a long period of time, using what is described as a “messed-up Shovelhead frame” as a starting point. Slowly, the project was gifted with an engine, the proper wheels a chopper should have, a peanut tank with some flame graphics no one can see without really looking, and a custom exhaust system to die for.
There’s something special about older Harleys. Maybe it’s their looks, maybe the engineering, or perhaps just nostalgia, but there are fans out there, not few, who would always choose an aging Harley over a newer one. And the same goes for custom shops.
In America, there are countless garages who like to take these old Harleys and customize them beyond recognition, as shown in June’s The No Show online event set up by the Milwaukee bike maker. Elsewhere, however, things are a bit different.
Take Europe, for instance. The continent is Harley-friendly, yes, but far less so than the home market. There’s no decades-old tradition there of riding these bikes, not in the way we have it in the U.S., and that means that custom shops, few as they are, usually steer clear of older H-D bikes when it comes to customizing them.
Have a look at one of Europe’s largest custom bike shop, Thunderbike. These guys probably have hundreds of customized motorcycles made over the past 25 years, but most of them are recent Softails, because this is what customers in Europe like.
But there are exceptions, and this here Super Glide is one of them. Also built by Thunderbike, it comes as a testimony of how older Harleys can be better platforms for customization than newer ones.
The bike is an FXE from 1977, and it was given its current shape at the end of a three-month long build that took place in 2016. It sports a Shovelhead engine inside the stock frame, and custom parts all around.
An S&S Super E carburetor, custom struts, special wheels and fenders, and of course a unique fuel tank are just a few of the over 20 aftermarket pieces of hardware that went into building the bike the shop calls Glamor.
We are not being told how much it cost to put the whole thing together, nor what happened to it in the years that have passed since its completion. But it sure looks great.
Join the Cantina to support Bikernet.com, stay wild and free forever; click here to view options
