
B&M Performance Cycle’s Ball Buster
Story by Wendy Manning
Photos by Sedrick C. Mitchell
Way up in northernmost New York State, in the town of Massena, overlooking the great St. Lawrence River and just a stone’s throw to the Canadian border, Merlon Rogers and his son Brad have turning out custom bikes at their auto-repair/bike shop B&M Performance Cycles. The bike you see here is their most recent, Ball Buster, and it took just three months to build.
“We’re small time, we’ve built about seven or eight bikes in the past five years,” Merlon said. He and Brad like to try things as the build progresses. His favorite part of this build, he said, is “Everything. When you’re there doing it, you figure out what you want for your frame and then you just go, ‘what would this look like?’ We get our pieces made and say ‘let’s try this angle, let’s try that way, let’s see what would look best.’ Same with the handlebars, we decide ‘should we go high bars? Or a set of drag or sport bars?’ “
Merlon said it’s been trial and error, but that’s part of the fun. “We’ve already built a bike called Flat Black Fighter, which is the same frame but a little bit different, different bars, and stuff like that. And it looks like a race bike but it’s a hardtail bobber,” he explained. “So we said let’s see what a set of high rise bars will do on it. Then we were gonna go with a spring seat, then we said no, let’s go with a hardtail seat. We just kept figuring out different things, that’s pretty much how we build, last minute decisions about how we want it. I think that makes it more interesting.”
For Ball Buster, Merlon and Brad chose a Maximum Metal Works frame. “The owner’s been a friend of mine for years,” Merlon said. “He’s from Canada. It’s only eight miles from my place to the border, and then his shop is only another four miles, so we’re close, but we’re in a different country. I just call him up and tell him what we’re looking to do and ask his opinion. He’ll say, ‘Well, this is popular frame right now, they’re goin’ nice for me right now.’ He does one up, sends it over to me, and that’s when we start doing the tank.”
Making modifications to the tank was similar to B&M’s previous build, but different. “We used Cole Foster for the tank and did a little modification,” Merlon said. “We raised it up a little higher. The one I had on my Flat Black Fighter, it’s the same one but raised up maybe three inches on the front. We just try different things before we do the actual finishing on the frame.”
Merlon happened to have the H-D wheels lying around his shop, so he powdercoated them black to go with the paint scheme on the bike. He likes to use V-Twin grips because “They’re an Old School grip,” he said, “and I like them because they’re rubber and comfortable to work with as far as riding goes. And I like the look. You want the new style of today so you don’t have the problems, but with the Old School look. You want something you can just get on and go with, and not have to worry about sitting along the side of the road.”
The paintjob, done by Merlon’s good friends Kipper (Merlon’s cousin) and Jeggers, is House of Kolor Tangerine. “I happened to see a car go by one day and I said, ‘Hmm, that’s a sharp looking color, let’s see if we can get that color.’ For a week I rode around town just keeping an eye open for that color car again. We found it, and then I bought a Verizon phone that was almost the same color, so I asked my painter if we could get that color and he said we’ll get something close to it. So that’s what we came out with.” Kipper also has a body shop. Merlon and Kipper and Jeggers often work together on projects. “Jeggers does all my artwork,” Merlon said. “I saw an eight ball with a crack in it on a race team, and told him this is what I’m lookin’ for. They had ‘Ball Breaker’ on there but I didn’t like it, so I said let’s go with Ball Buster. Throw a design on there for me, an eight ball with a crack in it and the words Ball Buster, and that’s the way it came out.”
Visit B&M Performance Cycles on the web to see their bikes, parts, frames, photo gallery and show schedule at www.bmperformancecycles.com.
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