Installment #11 – Makin’ Junk Run

I have a bitch about those who complain about guys who can buy new motorcycles, or trailer to events or even afford to have customs built. I got into custom bikes because of the freedom. I could do whatever I wanted and fuck anyone who didn’t like it. In the beginning I built bikes in the bedroom of a duplex, and this is one example. As much as I avoided cops all my life, most of my early bikes were ex-cop machines. I remember going with my dad to the Long Beach police auctions when I was 17 and watched two Panhead cop bikes roll out of the doors for about $650 apiece. I kick myself to this day. My first big twin was a ’66 Long Beach Cop bike with tank shift in about 1970. I tore into it while I did my final bit for the Navy. I had spent three tours in Vietnam, but the last ship I was stationed on was a reserve Tin Can in Long Beach harbor, the USS Maddox. I couldn’t ask for better duty in my home town. Reserves came on board generally on the weekends for training and I met a short squat biker, Andy Hansen, who wore Coke bottle glasses. He was building his first full-blown custom and I rode to his pad in Culver City to see his progress. During insuing meetings he mentioned that he was learning to build engines from Bob George, so I had the privelege to meet Bob, who built the ER streamliner, and started to learn the rebuilding process. Andy and I became friends and I spent almost every weekend hanging out with him or going to Bob’s for engine lessons.

About then I got out of the service, took a welding class and got a job at a local bike shop. Bikes were my life, from the first thing in the morning until I crashed. At that time I hated to sleep. Everyday was a party, an adventure and a learning experience. I was digging every minute of it. I was buying and selling bikes and building like a mad dog. I did everything except chroming and hated to leave parts at chrome shops. I wanted to set up chroming in my tiny back yard, if that was possible.

With each bike or box of parts I bought there was always broken shit. On the side, I made bathroom towel racks out of worn out chains. I made ash trays out of dented air cleaners. My pad was bizarre. One day I looked at my growing pile of broken parts and decided that I was going to build a motorcycle from scraps. Sort of an art project. My obscure plan was to build something strange, and I kept collecting parts. At the time my single-car garage was my assembly shop and my bedroom in the stucco duplex was the machine shop where I had a my Sunnon Hone and truing stand. The more I learned the more I could do. I learned how to rebuild master cylinders, carburetors, and how to replace seals in frontends, hone bushings, etc.

One day while roaming a swapmeet I spotted a bondo-ed raked, stock, whisbone frame. The kid in the booth told me $25 bucks and I grabbed it up. When I got it home, I looked under the bench and discovered that I was close to having a complete motorcycle, then another concept came to mind. I could build a complete running motorcycle with my scrap parts and see what it would cost me to build it. No chrome would be involved, no new parts unless they were engine or tranny internals, so I went after it. I built the engine myself in my bedroom, I did the same with the trans, put new seals in the front end, rebuilt the brakes, replaced the wheel bearings, painted the frame and Kawasaki tank army green and proceeded to wire the sucker. I made the sissy bar, the headlight bracket and a bunch of miscellanous shit. I welded up all the broken parts, rebuilt a distributor and fired it to life. It cost me approximately $550 bucks to piece together and rebuild. I mounted an old army ammo can to the sissy bar to carry tools.

During the break-in period I lost a wrist pin keeper and scored a cylinder. I fixed it, but did not rebore the cylinder (just honed it) so it smoked from that point on. It was never a long distance bike, although I rode it on a regular basis to the mountains for weekends. At one point I lost power in the woods and pulled it off the winding highway. The bike was still running, the clutch was engaged, but the sucker didn’t move. I had spun all the rivets out of the sproket around the brake drum. We took the brake drum off the bike and welded it to the sprocket at the fire station. Never gave me another problem.

We shot a road test of the army green scoot for one of our first issues of ER in the oil fields near the coast. And one time I tried to mount a sidecar to it and take my first wife on vacation. We were riding to Yosemite but never made it. I broke down countless times trying to get to Bakersfield. It took 13 hours to rumble over 150 miles from home in Long Beach. My first wife was cool and still jumped my bones in the freeway side hotel. When we decided to haul our asses home the bike never missed a beat except to start running out of gas on the edge of the city. We were so anxious to get home, I pulled off the freeway, jacked up the bow of the gas tank and putted on home.

I later stretched the frame and made the wildest rat bike on the planet. I made foot controls out of connecting rods that pivoted on wrist pins. I sold it to the publisher of Easyriders, Lou Kimzey, who sold it to Kim Peterson some years later. Kim, who is now the editor of In The Wind magazine, still has that motorcycle 25 years later now in a Paughco frame. He has all the heart in the world and the bike still has all the rat bike class on the planet.

Like I said at the first of this harangue, I do whatever I fuckin’ feel like. For 15 or 20 years I built every motorcycle I owned. If I want to work with someone now to build me a full on custom, or buy a new scoot, or trailer to Laughlin one year and ride the next, fuck anyone who doesn’t like it. I’m still in it for the freedom to do what I want, when I want.