It is close to 11 o’clock on a winter morning in Massachusetts, and it’s raining snow in the town of Northboro, home to Stone Motorcycle Company on Route 20, better known as Main Street. It’s a dark morning, made darker by the car radio announcing minute-by-minute reports of our collapsed economy. I’m driving about 10mph on my way to meet with Steve Stone, master fabricator and builder of custom motorcycles for 30-plus years. I was tempted to turn around, but I forged ahead, luckily, because once I’m inside the shop I’m greeted warmly by Steve, who is tall and trim and beaming the confident, optimistic smile that has certainly helped carry him this far in the industry. And why shouldn’t he smile? Steve is a real life winner with a shop overflowing with trophies and plaques to prove it. He’s gone the distance in this industry and managed to maintain his position in a market that, right now, is filled with disappearing acts. To survive, you’ve got to evolve, and Steve has come up with a lower-priced customs to meet the economic downturn, and has also stayed afloat by being a full-service shop. “We kind of shot ourselves in the foot for awhile when we were winning so many awards and showing up in magazines, people thought we didn’t do full service,” Steve says. “Hey, we win awards but we still fix flat tires!”

Steve’s been in the motorcycle business longer than not. Right out of high school he took a correspondence course in welding from East Coast Aero Tech and got a welding job at nearby Marlboro Airport, where some of the pilots were being influenced by a new movie called Easy Rider and wanted their motorcycles modified. They asked Steve if he was up to the task, and a career in the motorcycle industry was born. “I started getting requests to stretch out a frame, and I’d get one done and other people would see it,” he remembers. “In short order I had a lot of people wanting work done.”

By the time he was 19, he had his first motorcycle shop, Psycho Choppers, in the garage beneath his father’s house and business was literally and figuratively booming. “People started coming and going on their motorcycles and making noise, and it wasn’t zoned for business, so the town got nervous,” says Steve. “I’d been getting away with it when I was welding things here and there, but when all the bikes started coming and going and I was selling the popular parts that everybody wanted back then for choppers, the town shut me down.”

In the early years he had to move the shop a couple of times, going bigger with each move just to keep up. “We had so much work, it seemed like it was never going to end,” Steve says. By the time interest in choppers calmed down, Psycho Choppers had become Stone Motorcycle Company. “The choppers died out but we still had the pro-street-style motorcycles, and by then we were building big engines and I had some mechanics working for me.” Steve eventually moved into the shop he still occupies to this day; he now has just two full-timers in addition to himself: Brian Windward, who’s been with him for 12 years, and “Chopper Jay” McPhee, who specializes in custom paintjobs.

Although winter arrived early in Massachusetts, Steve’s customers haven’t been deterred by the snow on the ground. “Actually, just up until recently we’ve been busy all year, even in the wintertime, which is usually slow in New England for guys in the motorcycle business,” says Steve. “Winter became our busiest time of the year because guys wanted to be ready for spring with newer bikes to go to the shows and Daytona and stuff like that. Everything was good for many, many years.”

Steve says it’s not the New England climate but the economic climate that has slowed things down quite a bit, but he’s optimistic. “The work dribbles in, but it’s not like it used to be,” he says. “But it will change. We’ll be able to get through this no matter what happens because we’ve been here for so long, we own all our own tools, and we don’t owe any money on the building or things like that. Even when things are lean we can get through it. Motorcycling’s a big thing, people haven’t fallen out of love with motorcycles.” Yankee ingenuity has played a part of Steve’s strategy for survival, and to combat the economic slump, he’s introduced a lower-priced line of bikes. “Our $11,900 dollar bike, which is less than half of other bikes, have brought a new type of rider into the shop, a younger rider. So that’s helping us out. Plus we still have our repairs. We have so many bikes out there, we’re starting to get some of our bikes we built 10, 12, 15 years ago coming in now to be rebuilt.”

Having been trained by the legendary Fay Butler hasn’t hurt his business, either. “He’s the finest metal worker alive,” Steve says of Fay, whom he credits with teaching him so many of the things he wanted to use in creating his bikes. “I was interested in learning the right way to do it, make the steel last, how to make the welds better and stronger. That’s what Fay Butler is all about.” In comparing Steve to the more than 1,000 students Fay has had in his elite “Principles of Metal Shaping” program over the years (including Jesse James), Fay said, “I’ve worked with many high-profile people in the motorcycle industry and Steve is definitely one of the top guys who understood what I presented, and actually put it to use. Steve has a very quick mind…he understands the details and can see the larger picture, which is rare. He’s kind of a thinking man’s motorcycle builder.”

Yankee ingenuity, an affordable custom bike for the working man or woman, and a willingness to do oil changes. Yeah, we think the Stone Motorcycle Company will be around for a long, long time. Check out his website and his “Keep America Working Winter Sale” at www.stones-custom.com.