Installment #14 – The Steel Mentor

This issue I thought I’d touch on the art of building motorcycles, the desire and the talent. Many of the old school guys want to point fingers at those who don’t do their own work. On the other hand, if we didn’t have riders willing to pay the bill, a lot of brothers who are mechanics wouldn’t be making big candy working on bikes. Some of us aren’t blessed with the training or the tools, as I will demonstrate.

If it hadn’t been for my biker-hatin’ old man, I wouldn’t have learned squat. In this rambling I’ll compliment some of the builders I got to know and some who helped me survive from project to project.

I think it’s something in the blood that drives someone to learn how to build a bike from the ground up no matter if he or she has any talent, tools or resources. Some of us do it, some do it part way and some don’t fuck with it at all. In a sense, that’s the American way. We get to make the choice.

I was one who had the outlaw blood in his system. Once I had a bike, new or used, I didn’t want anyone to touch it but me. It took me 20 years to get over that attitude, but I did. Even some of the greats don’t do everything themselves. Arlen Ness works with a multitude of designers and fabricators, yet still does a lot of the building at home in his garage himself. Randy Simpson from Milwaukee Iron can do virtually everything on a motorcycle, yet rarely rebuilds engines. He would prefer to farm that aspect out, but he enjoys straightening a frame that was run over by a truck. Cyril Huze is a top notch designer who works with his own team but won’t step foot in a spray booth. He has the experts do the paintwork, although he breathes down their neck through the entire process. If you can’t do everything, that’s cool. It’s actually a pleasure to work with someone who can form a flat piece of tin into a shapely fender. It’s an art.

So let’s go back to when I was a kid and worked in my dad’s machine shop during the summers. I grew up around milling machines and lathes. Am I a helluva machinist? Hell no. My dad was also a welder who taught me never to move from a bead and not to flinch even when the slag was burning the shit outta me. He never welded with gloves on. I was in his shop welding a frame one afternoon when my grease-soaked Levi’s caught fire. He told me to keep welding while he put out the fire. As it turned out he couldn’t extinguish the growing blaze. When I finally finished the weld, I used thick leather welding gloves to put out the flames.

Ever since I first got my hands on a Harley, I wanted to learn everything to do with them. I didn’t care about being a great master machinist, just one good enough to make or fix shit for my bike. I started the mechanical aspect of working on bikes by rebuilding carburetors on a heavy cruiser off the coast of Vietnam in the late ’60s. While stationed on the USS Maddox, a reserve tin can, I was tearing bikes almost completely down, reworking the sheet metal and rebuilding the brakes and clutches while rewiring them. I was an electronics technician in the Navy so I wasn’t afraid of wiring. I tried my hand at painting from the Start, mostly with rattle cans.

During that period I met a rider from Culver City, Andy Hansen, who was also building his first custom. He was doing a way better job than I was. He had his frame professionally filled with Bondo and painted. He was learning how to rebuild engines from a guy named Bob George. Bob was a drag racer who liked to dream about records at Bonneville. He was the original builder of the ER Streamliner. As it turned out, Bob taught me how to build engines. I ended up having most of the equipment in my garage to rebuild engines although I never owned a boring bar. I could do lower ends, although I would generally have someone grind the valves and I would do all the assembly of top ends. Did I become a great engine builder? Hell no, but I kept all my bikes on the road for decades and built lots of engines for pals. I just wanted to know enough to keep my shit on the road.

I got to the point where I wanted to do everything, including chrome, if I had the opportunity. I learned a little about polishing and would polish aluminum rather that let some other sonuvabitch get his hands on my parts and hang me up for weeks.

That’s the way it was into the early ’80s. I liked to do it all, rebuilding, assembly and disassembly, welding, fabricating, paint and Bondo. Was I excellent at any of these arts? Fuck no, but I could build a cool bike that would hang for the long haul.

That blood still rushes through my veins, but over the years it has been my pleasure to work with the likes of Arlen, Mil Blair, Randy Simpson, Lee Clemens, Pat Kennedy, Jesse James and currently Big Jim of Dallas Easyriders. Some poke fun at these guys and call them high rollers. But the bottom line is that they know what they’re doing and are artists. Sometimes we can afford to work with these guys and sometimes we can’t, that’s just a roll of the financial dice. I don’t want to ever bring a guy down because he’s successful. That’s the American way, goddamnit.