Editor's Note:Following is the foreward from the new S&S Top 50 Builders book from Motorbooks by Jay Leno. It's an amazing compilation of the finest custom bike builders on the planet, wrapped around the 50th anniversary of S&S, the consummate American performance products manufacturer. Within 223 glistening pages, this large format volume documents the finest builders of classic V-twins with the absolute best detail photography from the pinnacle of motorcycle imagery, Michael Lichter. It doesn't get any better than this. If you want a copy, contact Motorbooks by clicking on their logo below, contacting S&S or stroll into any book store on the planet. If they don't have it, they'll order it for you, on the spot.--Bandit

MY FAVORITE TIME IN AMERICAN INDUSTRY was the early 1920s and ’30s. Back then guys like Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler would not only engineer cars, they would go out and build them. They touched the product, understood the design, and made sure it worked the way they intended.

When World War II came around, we didn’t just win the war because we had the best soldiers; we won because we were also the best industrial nation. We had the technical ability to produce a bomber every hour and the drive to make sure it happened. As a nation, we began building some of the coolest stuff: fast cars, fast motorcycles, and a whole industry of aftermarket performance parts, driven by guys who spoke a similar language—performance. A lot of what I know about S&S makes me respect them, much as I do about the Fords and Chryslers who built this country. When I call S&S I get a guy on the phone who speaks my language, understands what I am trying to do, and because he built my engine, he knows what I’m talking about. S&S is all about American performance. Let me tell you a quick story of how they got that way.

S&S’s motto is: “Fifty Years of Proven Performance.” Not all 50 of those years were spent touting proven performance, but the tag line has suited S&S for a long time. Back in 1958 S&S got its start when George J. Smith figured out that people would pay him to make their bikes faster. Smith was a sharp guy—he figured out how to make his bike faster than those of everyone else around his Blue Island, Illinois, home. He would spend his weekends dominating at the local drag strip in Half Day Illinois. Smith had another thing going for him besides being a good tuner: his wife Marge ran his business for him. While George tinkered in the shop or worked on the lathe, Marge took care of business, answering calls, writing orders, and doing tech support on the phone. Their business was the stuff American dreams are made of—the chance to make a good living at something they loved. Both George and Marge loved riding, and after they moved the business—and family—to Viola, Wisconsin, in 1969, George built a couple bikes to test parts for himself and then put together a clean ’66 Shovel for Marge and him to ride on. Turns out the ’66 was a sleeper; it had a set of S&S stroker flywheels and all too often showed its taillight to challengers on the winding roads of Wisconsin, with both George and Marge on it.

When the second generation of S&S family members took over the business, it was a time of change in the motorcycle industry. The custom bike world on the level we now know it was born. Sure customs and choppers had been around forever, but when S&S released the first 96-ci long block, the custom world changed. At the same time the S&S long block hit, a number of frame manufacturers began offering frames with pretty much any rake, stretch, and design a custom builder could want. As the custom builders started showing off what they could do with the 96-incher, demand for Harley-Davidson motorcycles skyrocketed. Obviously owners were going to need to add power—and then customize their bikes to make them stand out.

The surcharge added by the customizing drove the cost of an H-D up some $10,000 or more. This created a business model that transformed S&S from a well-known carburetor manufacturer to the premiere provider of original equipment engines to almost every custom builder. The custom bike business drove S&S to run two and three shifts from the mid-90s up until about 2004. The demand for their engines was intense, but so were the new EPA regulations on the horizon.

As S&S moved into the third generation of Smith family members, full attention was devoted to building a proprietary engine that would meet future emissions requirements—the X-Wedge. I know a little about this unique engine, as I own a bike with a 117-ci X-Wedge in it. The engineering in it just makes sense. Still air cooled, it uses pushrods but benefits from a 56-degree v-angle, three cams, and a massive one-piece crankshaft. The mass helps reduce vibration, increases low-end torque, and makes my bike a whole lot of fun to ride. Fifty years of proven performance. S&S is far from where they started in 1958—look at the fifty bikes in this book and you can see the past, the present, and the future of what this American icon is going to give the motorcycle industry for the next 50 years.