Well, probably the best Goldilocks compromise of all, the 26-inch wheel which still has the look, just not too much of it. As Jon Lovitz’s SNL perpetual-liar character, Tommy Flanagan, would say, “Yeah, that’s the ticket.” And so it is with this lovely Street Glide built for Alex Mabe of Germantown, North Carolina, by Joey Hensley of Backyard Baggers in Winston-Salem, North...

   See and be seen is what Allstate Insurance and Rick Fairless was promoting when this bike first came on the scene a few years ago. It still is out and about promoting Allstate’s way of “Raising awareness and asking motorists to look twice at intersections for motorcycles because Once Is Never Enough.” That even led to this being called the O.N.E. bike and I’m sure you can figure...

   Adding even more pressure was the fact that the crew at Xotic Customs only had three weeks to pull it off as they had been busy finishing other builds and the coming out party at Sturgis was already scheduled. Now that’s a deadline if there ever was one. Goat dropped his well-used (some might say abused) 2008 Harley Street Glide with the only building stipulation that it was to...

   All of this pink and bling started out as a regular old 2010 Harley-Davidson Street Glide before serial custom bagger builder, Andrew Rumley, owner of Custom Cycles Ltd, in Greensboro, North Carolina, got his hands on it. Somehow I know this overall look was Jennifer’s idea as I doubt very much that Andrew had this built as a spec bike for sale. There’s so much of one woman’s...

   Working in the custom motorcycle industry has a lot of advantages when it comes time to build a bike of your own. You’ve got connections for all sorts of services and advice (whether you want it or not) and you probably know the inside skivvy on who to go to. There’s even the pretty good chance you’ve got the line on getting parts at a reasonable cost to help keep things in...

  First off, the sleek overall profile still smacks a bit of factory but with a lot more flow from stem to stern like a beautiful powerboat on plane and that’s okay. A design we love has taken a turn for the better with a nice massaging of parts and pieces artfully integrated to take the dowdy and turn it into rowdy. Things look comfortably familiar, yet totally different. It’s...

  So what happens when you finally finish up your balls-to-the-wall custom bagger? Do you enter it in the first show you can find or maybe ride it around a bit and show your handiwork off to the great unwashed masses? Or, maybe a little bit of both. Those are the avenues most owners will try, but there’s always someone who takes the road less traveled. In this case, it’s a guy from...

       I literally get to scan over thousands of his photos and every now and then something pops up that catches my eye and not for the usual reasons. Take this 2010 Harley-Davidson custom bagger in pink owned by Tiler “Booger” Weston of Elm City, North Carolina. When I looked at the relatively tiny .jpg in the gallery, all I could think of is that “They’ve finally gone too far”...

Harley-Davidson Road Glides with their frame-mounted dual-headlight fairings were never my cup of tea, I’m more of a batwing kind of guy. I totally understand all the so-called benefits of a frame-mounted fairing, but I’m a sucker for looks and the FLTR fairing just didn’t do it for me. Call me traditional or whatever you want, but from the original ’79 Shovelhead Tour Glide model...

Man, it’s getting to be 15-years ago in the custom motorcycle world. Especially in the custom bagger segment where builders can’t seem to build a radical bagger and hold onto it for any length of time like their forbearers did with those wild and whacky rad modern choppers straight out of TV land. I couldn’t help but notice that whenever a camera went into the back rooms or outside...