Maybe it’s just the bad boy bruiser image I get whenever I see a stripped-down bike with chubby FLH-style mag wheels and tires front and rear or maybe it’s the attitude-adding combo of straight pipes and a springer, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the never-intended, but it sorta happened anyway Exile-on-a-dime look, maybe, maybe, maybe . . . All I know is that I’d love to pin the throttle on John’s Sporty then shift a gear up and like the shampoo directions say, “lather, rinse, repeat” until it’s bellowing along in top gear. It would seem that there’s nothing sensible about this bike and that’s what makes it so cool.

But, this bike is a sensible bike in a lot of ways like the fact that John didn’t have his eye on some bike on a dealer’s showroom floor nor was he looking for a cherry and pricey bike to start with. Actually John bought this “totally burnt Sporty at an insurance auction and that’s how it turned out being a Sporty.” Now that sounds like a sensible purchase to me if you’re a builder looking for new fodder. Another sensible part was buying a less expensive 883 rather than a 1200 Sporty that John inexpensively made a much more ass-kickin’ 1200 with a boring on out to the eastside (all due respect to El Paso’s late and beloved Sherman Hemsley). Most sensible of all was John’s initial idea of what he wanted to do with the burned carcass. “I thought ‘Why not make it something small and fast?’ I always wanted a springer, however, so I gave up a little handling for looks in that decision,” he said adding, “but I went with 130mm x16” front and rear tires to make it handle as best as could be.” Sounds like the sensible thing to do to me and it looks wicked cool too.

While he was at it, John made the XL a hardtail, but sensibly added a good looking and well padded seat mounted on a set of Chopper Shox shocks to keep the ride from being too hard on his tail. There’s a bunch of repurposing going on, but that’s because John wanted to keep within a strict budget of sensibly cheap. Not a damn thing wrong with that as far as I’m concerned. Imagination always wins out over money to me anyway. “There is very little money in the build. Most everything is a take-off,” said John.

A couple of things that are killer just by themselves are the exhaust and paint. John’s exhaust just has that street scrambler look to it that you know is not going to make you new friends, but it’s no concern of his. “One of the things I wanted to do was to make sure the exhaust would go right into the windows of all the tuner cars with their fart can exhausts. They drive past my house all day so it’s a little payback,” said John. As far as the paint goes, well that’s not so potentially controversial. “The color was my mother’s suggestion, her favorite color is purple,” he said. “The tank was painted by Mike Hluhan from Cut Throat Paint. I am very happy with how it turned out. I gave it to him with a crazy time frame and he did a killer job.”

Mike’s paint job is nicely offset with just the right amount of shiny stuff to make it a chopper in the truest sense. The chrome rear fender and polished aluminum taillight balance out the springer front end and the heads and engine covers. A little bling is not offensive especially when it’s not just a bunch of shiny new chrome parts bought out of a catalog for the sake of added shininess. Somehow I don’t envision John busy marking parts that have to go to the chromers during teardown. If it was on a shelf and shiny, I can see him keeping it that way, but remember this was a sensible budget build (so to speak, I know being sensible was really not John’s main purpose in this build, but building a kick ass-bike was).

What I do look forward to is some more feature bikes from Bridge City where John and his partner Zack both work full-time jobs to make a living while working after hours on bikes until they can do that full time. From what I’ve seen on their website and what they’ve sent for future articles, it shouldn’t be too long before their day jobs are just getting in the way. In the meantime, John’s got a Sporty to blast around downtown Pittsburgh and the back roads of southwest Pennsylvania on and that sounds like the perfectly sensible thing to do with a bike this cool.