Archive for September, 2010

American Chopper – Senior vs Junior Episode 6

Due to York PA’s bike weekend I didn’t get time to watch episode 6 of the new American Chopper until last night. I know many of you stop in every Friday to check out my latest blog posts. Sorry for the delay; which is going to be at least another day as I have got to get going to work.  Promise I’ll have my completely non professional opinion of the episode posted by tomorrow am including Senior’s attempt at actually undermining Paulie’s business..

Scott

Here it is…

This show actually keeps getting better!I have to admit I was extremely disappointed in the lack of bike building in the first couple of episodes, but now we are seeing our share at both shops. Thanks, TLC! While Seniors shop built a very tasteful OCC chopper with a fold down gas tank for the FBI and the Newburgh police dept. Junior continued both of his builds: the new Geico bike and Anti-Venom; his latest web themed bike.

Junior brings Lee up from down south to work on the Geico bike, which he does for exacty one day before quitting without notice over Junior’s poor work habits. But not before Senior attempts to buy him off with a $1000 dollar a day offer to come work at OCC instead of Pal Jr designs. Being a man of his word( kind of) Lee refuses, of course, but he still quits on Paulie.

If you DVR’d or Tivo’d this one(does anyone still TIVO?)you’ll want to watch it tonight I’m sure..

Episode 5: Senior Vs Junior – Junior builds a bike.

Last night’s American Chopper finally shows us Junior building a new bike, and also getting his first paying customer: Geico. The Geico bike and the newest web theme bike called ‘Anti-Venom” were both debuted at Sturgis last month( see: Paul Jr at Sturgis), so there no surprises there, but I, for one, am very happy for all the time that was spent on the actual builds.

It was even nice to see the silly ramp being built, that OCC made to launch an effigy of Junior across the creek. Paul Sr. is really taking this father-son thing too far, but he claims it’s all in good fun.

Meanwhile Paul Jr. Designs has apparently snagged the painting talents of Nub back. I’m still wondering what happened to the first painter on American Chopper, Justin. His business is still in Newburgh, and I know that he filed a lawsuit against Discovery and OCC for using his artwork without giving him compensation on merchandise. What I’m hearing is that he was never paid for any of the theme bikes he did for them, doing them simply for the publicity. Which means OCC got the paint job for free but then turned around and charged the client for it. What a sweet deal for them.  How many other parts on those bikes were obtained the same way?

And I’m sure JR is doing the same thing; getting his equipment for free and probably a good portion of his parts. Wonder if he’s paying Nub or not?  Heck; is he even paying Vinnie, or is this just free publicity for V-Force customs? Imagine if we could run our business by creating products with donated parts?

As we move forward I’m hoping that future bikes come out better that the new Geico bike. A tail? Are you serious?

The Future Of Custom Choppers

The Future Of Custom Choppers

With the imminent demise of the TV show ‘American Chopper”, the future of custom choppers will be left without a major marketing aid to constantly remind us how much we love choppers. The only custom motorcycle themed show to last more than a season, one has to wonder if the cancellation will have a profound impact on the industry as a whole or is the internet enough to keep it going?

The boost the custom motorcycle business received from the television show created around a group of guys who built custom choppers rivaled the dot com craze in the late nineties as far as the swell of new companies entering the business. As with any artificially created demand, eventually consumers came back to reality and many of the newly created motorcycle shops were forced to close their doors.

Once an almost completely underground market, the interest that was generated in those who would normally not be interested in choppers also propelled small companies into huge success and created an internet niche that has remained as large as it was during the custom motorcycle craze. Since websites are much less expensive to maintain than brick and mortar businesses, the economic slump did little to affect the huge number of websites that were built around custom motorcycles.

The question now is whether or not the business of building choppers can survive through this recession with only magazine ads and internet buzz to keep it a float. I would suspect many small shops that are barely hanging on will close their doors before the end of the year. Some may simply turn back into one man operations that can no longer afford a crew of bike builders.

The good news for hands on builders is that each one only needs to produce 5 or 6 choppers a year to keep their heads above water. And the few customers looking for choppers in these tough times are also the sort to not search for bargains as much as getting the bike they really want. Most blue collar workers, the type that were stretching their budgets to get into their own custom bikes when times were good are certainly not going to risk their families financial future on a $30,000 toy.

So this really leaves only the well to do and bikers as potential buyers of custom bikes in general. I believe the average Joes will come back to buying choppers but not until this economic slump is truly over and Americans are no longer afraid to spend money again. But we have certainly seen the heyday of the custom chopper industry. There’s just simply no way it will be what it was during the American Chopper craze.

Probably more than half of those that bought custom bikes just because of the show have already traded them in on more practical motorcycles, if they’re even still riding. When times got tough many just couldn’t justify keeping something in the garage for an occasional ride that was worth more than a lot of Americans make in a year.

While there is future for choppers, it isn’t going to look anything like the recent past.

History Of Choppers As I See It

History Of Choppers As I See It

No one knows who exactly built the first choppers, but it is generally agreed upon that they were built by soldiers returning home from WWII. Soldiers who had ridden bikes in Europe found that the Harleys being produced in the US were slow and bulky, something that is still true today.

In an effort to lighten these bikes up the riders started to remove unnecessary parts and “bob” the fenders. Had the European motorcycles been readily available in America I believe that these bikers might have abandoned Harley right then and we would have a completely different biker scene than what we have today.

These early modified bikes were called Bobbers and the term Choppers actually didn’t get popular until the sixties and early seventies. Most sources reference the movie Easy Rider as the start of the cultural phenomena, but national news about the antics of the Hells Angels certainly had the image of the biker outlaw already fixed in the public’s eye, a much badder version than we saw in the movie The Wild One from 1953.

The new generation that was chopping bikes made their own style by not just bobbing the bikes but by adding additional rake and longer front ends and of course the obligatory sissy bar. The bikes we know as choppers were born. I think it’s interesting that even though the two terms “bobber” and “chopper” became distinct 40 years ago they are now being used interchangeably, mostly by people who don’t really understand the terms at all.

The choppers of the late sixties went from just being bobbed Harleys with no turn signals and mirrors to being also modified bikes with ape hanger handle bars, like Sonny Barger was using back in the late 50′s, skinny front tires and the already mentioned sissy bar. Now we were no longer just removing unnecessary parts but were also adding a few touches of our own. Back then there were no “custom bike builders” and most of the work was being done in the rider’s own garage. As we went into the seventies, builders began to get really creative and the bike as a form of art was born.

Artist David Mann captured the entire chopper lifestyle in his work, and builders actually tried to now build bikes based on Mann’s more extreme artistic interpretations of what choppers could look like. The bikes that Dave imagined soon came into actually being. The seventies were definitely made for custom bikes.

Interest in motorcycles kind of fizzled out around during the 80′s when young people were more interested in building muscle cars out of models from the late sixties and seventies than they were in motorcycles. At the same time a lot of riders were converting to Japanese sport bikes and moving away from the Harley scene and any choppers you did see just seemed like relics from a bygone era. The biker scene didn’t go away by any means, but it definitely went underground as far as the general population was concerned.

Of course, everything we know today about custom motorcycle building as been brought about by cable TV trying to fill the dead air with stories about anything they could and the first show done about Jesse James was never intended to turn into a new television genre, but it did. The well-to-do suddenly decided they needed a custom bike and not knowing any of the history of motorcycles they immediately started calling every custom motorcycle a chopper, even though by definition it wasn’t. In fact the bikes made popular by builders not on TV were usually more in the style of Pro Street motorcycles that were run on the drag tracks then by anything that resembled a true chopper, with a few notable exceptions.

As the desire for custom bikes and motorcycles in general bloomed in more middle class citizens, these new riders were more likely to take the time and understand their bikes, many of which had to learn to work on them out of pure necessity, like the original bikers did. Motorcycles and custom bikes became an acceptable form of fun for everyone and the image of the outlaw biker as been converted into the lawyer or plumber biker.

Even though we still have some real choppers being built, the true meaning of the word has probably been lost forever, but not the spirit of those that built them. As custom bikes go out of style we’re left with a very large core group of new riders who will now ride the rest of their lives, and many of them will be also building choppers.

American Chopper: Senior vs Junior Episode 4

Last night’s American Chopper took quite a serious note as a worker fell to his death while doing repairs on Paul Jrs new building. This story was all over the internet when it happened, and I’m going to leave the man’s name out of my post, since TLC left it out of the show. I did find it interesting that most news stories at the time reported that the worker was working on an OCC building, when it fact it was Paul Jr Designs new building.

Paul Sr. again tried to reach out to one of his sons; this time Paulie, to no avail. I think if these two guys could get their legal problems settled, they might have chance at a father and son relationship although, apparently Sr is not on speaking terms with any of his children. Must be them, right?

The Meteorite Men Bike

Orange County Choppers built a bike last night for the Science Channel’s Meteorite Men show. Since TLC and the Science Channel are all part of the Discovery network, I’m sure they may have been footing the bill for promotional reasons. Ths bike was certainly not a chopper but at least that actually showed a good deal of the fabrication and final assembly on this bike.

Meanwhile, Paul Jr still continues to not build a bike, as he apparently can’t get electric in his building fast enough to get started. And we find out that Mikey Teutel has been driving without insurance. Do you think the Montgomery police will track him down and issue a citation after watching last night’s show?