Brown Suga got its start when Pat was cruising for motorcycle magazines and a BMX mag jumped out and caught his eye. “On the cover was a real sharp-looking BMX bike with a guy doing a backflip on it,” Pat explained. He liked the chocolate colors of the bike, especially the black rims with brushed spokes. “I thought it would be a cool color scheme for a motorcycle,” he said.
Having just sold his CFL, Pat was making plans to build another bike but was “sick of all the bullsh*t bolt-on stuff that cost me a fortune on my last bike,” he said. “So I decided to use the old method of use-what-you-got.” What he had was a ’99 H-D Evo motor and tranny (with RevTech’s 6-speed gearset). “The satin gray finish was perfect but it needed a little jazzing up,” he said, and hit up a friend for a new set of Sportster rocker boxes that fit perfectly and looked “ten times better than the stock chrome ones.” The S&S carb he got from another friend’s crashed Softtail. “It was great but the air cleaner was kinda boring, so I drilled some air holes in it and added a K&N filter,” he said.
Tired of stretched and rigid frames, as well as the stretched out price tags that come with them, Pat turned to eBay. “It took a couple of weeks,” he said, “then BAM…I saw it: a Santee 200 wide-tire frame FLH-style. Perfect.” It turns out Pat was the only bidder and scooped it up for $300, which he described as “Crazy.”
When he received the frame it was unacceptably stock. “Fat Bob backbone with no stretch and a 30-degree rake, very boring,” said Pat. Worse yet was the fact it would only take a Shovelhead motor. But instead of junking the frame, Russ and Pat decided to radically modify the frame and make it Evo friendly. After they built a frame jig, the frame was modified with 2” added to the downtube and 2” in the backbone. Welding on a Voodoo Choppers ProStreet neck gave a 38-degree rake and the look they wanted. For frame gussets, Pat drew inspiration from above: the overhead train tracks in the city. The front chin gusset is a piece of diamond plate his brother had saved from working at the World Trade Center site.
It was back to eBay for the trees, forks, gas tank, and front wheel. “The Sportster tank is totally modified with a deeper tunnel, flat bottom and a brushed stainless-steel gas cap,” Pat said. “The oil tank is all handmade out of 16-gauge steel and it has a built-in battery box.” Black Bike supplied the cool 7”-wide rear wheel and Pat had them refinish the front to match.
All in all, Brown Suga took eight months to build, with Pat collecting parts, such as the Dyna foot controls, from friends along the way. “He was going to throw the foot controls out…ha!” said Pat.
Ha! indeed.
Builder: Pat Tuffy and Russ Amoruso
New Yorker Pat Tuffy of Yonkers is co-owner of 91 Customs along with Russ Amoruso. New on the scene, Pat’s a young guy, a smart guy, and we liked him a lot. Brown Suga caught our attention in much the same way his inspiration for the bike (a BMX magazine cover) caught his. Did I mention he’s also a resourceful guy? Sick of paying high prices for bolt-on parts, he took a proactive stance and used pieces of scrap metal he had lying around his shop and went hunting in more than a few friends’ garages and on eBay to come up with many of the parts for Brown Suga. “This is the type of build we like to do. Everything was cheap and it came out great,” said Pat. “It’s a lot of fun taking used stuff and making it look new, it’s really cool. It’s the right type of build for the economy now.”
Russ and Pat may be young guys, but they’ve got a history of building hot rods and bikes going back to their late teens. It’s also good to know that 91 Customs is your one-stop custom shop whether it’s cars or bikes. “We’re still doing one alongside the other,” Pat said. “We’re doing a ’33 hot rod, you can see it on the website, and a couple of bikes right now. They try to do as much in-house as possible and the only thing they farm out is paint and bodywork. Having a trusted friend and painter like Eddie Pinstripe available almost makes that an in-house proposition anyway. They’re not divas either and do custom and service work on Harleys to help pay the bills. Smart lads.
Be sure and check out their very cool website (www.ninetyonecustoms.com) and see the video of Brown Suga in action.
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