What you see is not always what you initially got and that’s a good thing, although there’s quite a backstory as to how Paul Shrader of Gulf Coast Sledz in Chiefland, Florida, came up with this wicked nifty ride for a friend in need.

Sometimes my own motorcycle prejudices get in the way of really seeing what’s there. My first glance at the ChopSmitty entry called SheWinns in the Ultimate Builder Custom Bike Show fired off the ignorance neurons in my brain thinking that this was some sort of kid’s bike when I recognized the Briggs & Stratton engine architecture. A very cool kid’s bike, but a kid’s bike nonetheless. Man-oh-man was I wrong about that. After I parked my initial impression and really looked a bit deeper, ChopSmitty’s Greg Green had really built a serious Ultimate Builder contender that just happened to have something other than a typical 45-degree V-twin engine. The more I checked it out, the more intriguing the whole thing became.

Three strange looking two-wheeled conveyances appeared at the Corbin facility with motorcycle legend, Craig Vetter, on the lead vehicle. For those of you who aren't hip to Craig's place in the history of motorcycles, in my opinion, he is the guy who revolutionized the way we ride.

Yup, one look at LC Fabrications’ Old Black and I got the Beatles’ song Chains loudly reverberating around in my noggin. Unlike the Beatles’ lyrics where the next line is “And they ain’t the kind that you can see-ee-ee-ee”, everywhere you look on Old Black there are chains. Real chains. There are chains on the rear tire, chains on the primary, and as my lovely mom used to call out when she was flabbergasted, Mother of Mercy! there are dual chains to each side of the rear wheel. LC Fab’s Jeremy Cupp’s got a thing about chains along with the imagination, the artistic ability, and the mechanical know-how to build his modern version of a vintage hill climber that doesn’t look gimmicky or out of place. Aretha Franklin’s song Chain of Fools does not apply in any way to this overall winner of the 2012 Ultimate Builder Show’s Grand National Champion award.

Man I hate that I’ve become one of those blabbing old guys always spouting off some now-garbled story about how it was back then. Kinda like Grampa Simpson’s rants¾ “So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say or “My story begins in Nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say dickety because the Kaiser had stolen our word for twenty. I chased him down the road but gave up after dickety-six miles . . .”