So what makes it so special that I’m declaring my “love” for this Sportster custom known as Animal? It’s not what you might think as nothing so special like it’s never been done before in all honesty, but it’s a dandy piece of combining all the things that pull at my custom bike heart strings in jus the right way. It’s light, fast, loud, sharp looking with a nice stance, and just begs me to get on and ride the hell out of that mess of vibrations known as a non-rubber mount Sporty. Yup, this was originally a stock 2002 Harley-Davidson XL 883 with its own back story.
Seems that this bike once belonged to an ex-wife of Chris Garrison and, well, you know how all that crap goes. Chris tried to make the best of a bad thing and put this baby through the custom mill until W.T. Customs and CG Customs had erased most anything related to its former life with a former wife. W.T. Customs performed the heavy metal fabrication work like the exquisite hardtail rear and the just-right neck stretch that sets the hot rod tone for the rest of the build. W.T Customs has over 50 photos of this build on their Facebook page and it’s fun to watch Animal come to life a photo at a time.
But wait, there are more things that might not hit you in the face when you first look like the gorgeous oil tank or the wonderfully designed and fabbed clubman café bars. And, you can’t overlook the other pieces of tinwork like the fuel tank with site gauge or the big bastard headlight that has got to be a blast barreling along the highway behind. Apparently Chris was a bit of a biker even when he was a kid pedaling a BMX bike around as he’s incorporated BMX pedals for footpegs and has a nifty Mongoose Bicycles head tube badge proudly attached to the Sporty’s head tube. You can take the boy off the BMX bike, but you can’t take the BMX spirit out of the boy and that’s a good thing.
The 883cc engine found itself a little short on cubic-centimeters so Chris did the beast thing you can with an 883 and easily upped the ante to a full-blown 1200cc. That increase in size along with a bit of headwork and a hotter cam makes those W.T. Customs’ fabricated pipes sing the internally-combusted Sportster song it was always intended to before the DOT and EPA put a stranglehold on showroom floor volume. The header wrapping might be hip and stylish, but looks absolutely necessary to help keep the exhaust heat in check with the rider’s right leg in such close proximity to hot, spent gases.
What CG Customs is really all about is paint, paint, and more paint. Chris paints most anything from bikes to cars to boats and, well, whaddaya got? He’s not just some fly-by-night painter either as he’s done commissions like fixing and repainting a historic million-dollar-plus Porsche 908 race car. You gotta be pretty damn good with paint before a Porsche purist will let you near their vehicle and he is from what I’ve seen of his work. On this bike Chris has laid down a lovely sparkly gold base with (what I know as) a fish scale design paneling throughout the bodywork. It looks simple, clean, and fits the persona of this Sportster café bobber perfectly.
All in all, I really do love this bike as it looks like something I’d want to ride and ride hard with a big sh*t-eating grin on my face because it was so much silly fun. Chris may have unfortunately lost a wife, but he gained a wicked ride out of the deal and winning big-time awards is not too shabby a deal either. Seems like Chris may have won out in the long run and even if he wasn’t the big winner as he sees it, his bike is a big winner in my eyes. Love it, love it, love it.
For more info on CG Customs, let your fingers do the walking to http://cgcustoms.net/Home.html and check out Chris’ work.