Choppers
Here’s his story of how this custom Big Dog you’re looking at came to be. “My first wife died suddenly. We drove truck together and we came home on a Wednesday and she died on Thursday. I didn’t have any family where I was at, I don’t know, I was screwed up. I’ve been riding since ’81, but I didn’t have a bike at the time and one day I just decided to go buy another motorcycle, just ride, see if I could get the cobwebs out of my head,” said Dennis. “That became my therapy. Every week when I came home from work, I would start doing something on the bike, Debbye came along in ’05 and we got married and she’s put up with a lot from me with the bike. A lot of times, the bike came first. I even told her the bike was first. Well, not now it’s not! (Laughing and quickly correcting himself because she was within easy earshot at the wheel of their rig). Unless you’ve been through that, it’s a crazy thing to go through when somebody just dies.”
Well that’s the long story short with no disrespect, but Dennis has depended on his Big Dog to get him through the hard times and he’s a lucky guy as he not only got through it, but he’s a very happy man these days. If you’ve scrolled through the photos, you’ll see the various incarnations it’s been through possibly reflecting the changes Dennis has gone through. “I bought it new in ’03 off the showroom floor. I probably drove it no more than a couple of months before I started working on it. The first thing to go was the pipes. I’m on the fourth or fifth set now. I’ve still got all the pipes. My wife says ‘We’ve got to get rid of some of this stuff (laughs),’ ” said Dennis explaining why, “I like all the different sounds that come out of it. I just bought a set of 2-into1 Exotic pipes to put on it now.”
Through all the changes and over 11,000 West Virginia back-road miles, the 107”S&S has been a trooper. “I haven’t had a bit of trouble with it. They’re good, they’re strong, and they’re dependable,” said Dennis. “I changed the ignition to a Crane Hi-4 and put the breather on there. I had one of the single D&M units and when they came out with the dual setup, I bought the first one they ever sold when I saw it at their display in Myrtle Beach about three years ago. The bike’s been dyno’d at 105 horsepower and about 114 pounds of torque.”
Myrtle Beach also provided another story and another style change. “I was riding to Charleston from Myrtle Beach with my buddies and all four of the stock bolts holding the front fender on snapped. The fender rolled underneath the wheel and I was going down the road like a Jet-Ski. I held it, never lost it and the guys said they had no idea how I held that thing up ‘cause I was all over the place with it,” said Dennis. “After that, I left the fender off and put a Maltese Cross on it and changed out all the bolts to stainless steel so I wouldn’t ever have to worry about it again.”
Another of the changes he made along the way was the hand shift/foot clutch setup that friend Art Corseiti fabbed the shifter for. “Art also built the sissy bar as well as the shifter. Man, the guy’s good. I had the hand shifter and foot clutch for a couple of years and I got pretty good with it, but for the moment I’m back to a hand clutch now,” said Dennis. “The reason I changed everything back was because I’m starting to get arthritis and you gotta have a good hold of that bike. It’s really, really heavy.” After a little discussion about how the Grandeur Auto-Clutch might help him out, Dennis was already starting to think about going back to the hand shifter again.
You’ve probably noticed Dennis has a bit of a spike thing going on with this bike and by his count, there are 173 of them. “I started out with spike axle covers and the mechanic at Full House Cycles in Winchester, Virginia, where I bought it said, ‘You should go with the spike theme.’ I thought that was a pretty good idea,” he said. “Some of those are razor sharp. You gotta be careful when you get on and off it, it’ll eat you up. The mechanic told me he’d probably end up on Workmen’s Comp when he worked on it. Actually, I’ve probably bled a lot from it, you know you’ll get off balance and go to catch it and I’ve messed myself up. Debbye used to cuss it all the time ‘cause she ended up bleeding whenever she got around it.”
There have been some other changes that have come into their lives because of this bike and Dennis said, “Debbye rode on the bike with me when we first met and when we went to Myrtle Beach one year, she saw some little hundred-pound girl riding one of them big IronHorse choppers and said, ‘Hell, if she can do that, I can do that.’ When we came back, she went to a two-day school and she was riding. She not only loves it, but she’s got a nice lookin’ ride too. We bought an early Rocker and put Vance & Hines pipes on it and we’re going to black it out.”
Dennis and Debbye and the Big Dog have weathered the years and gone through a lot of changes, all for the good from my conversation with Dennis. Maybe that T-shirt saying, You Never See a Motorcycle Parked Outside of a Psychiatrist’s Office, is true after all. At least one thing I’m pretty certain about is that you won’t find an extremely spikey Big Dog or a blacked-out Rocker wearing West Virginia plates anywhere near there. “All that money I’ve spent on that thing, I don’t regret it. I think that bike was my rehab, better than giving money to a shrink,” said Dennis adding with a big laugh, “they’re crazy anyway.”
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