Yup, my “personal” experience with the owner of Combat Cycles in Jacksonville, North Carolina, entirely consists of watching him on Discovery’s BikerLive: The Tar Heel State and YouTube. Combine that with a bit of the bikes he and his two cohorts at Combat, Pig the fabricator and Dave the engine guy, have built and I think you got a pretty good picture of a guy who’s comfortably satisfied with where he’s at. I had to admit I don’t know how he got out of getting caught up in any scripted bullshit/temper tantrums, but he got my respect for that. He and the lads came to build, really build, this feature bike called Shoulda for the Tar Heel episode.     

 

   I say “really build” because they started with a disheveled Shovelhead that had apparently been left outside leaning against a building forever or something close to that. Maybe, maybe not depending possibly what the show’s producer ‘requests,’ but either way it was a POS. This was not just to be a ground-up build, but a crank-up build to. Remember, you’ve got BikerLive’s expected short build time that looks like it takes all the fun out of building a bike and maybe cause a few friendships to be strained. Oh well, that’s TV I guess.

 

   The bike they started with was a 1979 Harley-Davidson Shovelhead of some sort and the first thing they had to check was to see if the Shovel ran at all. They could have called Barnett H-D GM Mark Barnett and asked him as he told me once years ago that he’s never ever run into an old Harley that wouldn’t run with a bit of work and from my experience at Barnett’s, he was never wrong. Other than a couple of trade-ins that featured their internals removed, every porch rat started.

 

Needless to say, Combat’s Shovel ran (sorta) so it was yanked so Dave (AKA the Cranky Yankee) could rebuild and refinish it inside and out from top to bottom. He’s very meticulous and some might even say fussy, but he did a helluva job on the original POS.  With a background of black cases and cylinders, the lovely chrome on the heads, pushrods, air cleaner, engine covers, etc, stands out like it always has. Black and chrome can do no wrong. Throw in the chrome headers that ensnare the engine like a chrome bear hug before dumping out wherever they do along with the chrome kick start tranny and you’ve got a winner. 

 

    There are a few other nice engine/tranny details like the hand shifter setup that looks like it takes on the ultimate musclecar shifter, the legendary Mopar pistol grip shifter, with a twist of its own, the knife grip shifter. Actually that’s my take not Combat’s, but Jim apparently made this out of an old oak kitchen cabinet so maybe I’m not so far off. Either way, it connects up to a little village of heim-joint levers on top of the tranny that’s just mechanically cute as hell. Dave also kept it real as the kids used to say, with a beefy flesh-eating single-row primary chain and sprockets spinning the highly-exposed clutch. Very board tracky and not a bike to break out the old bell bottoms on just for old time’s sake. Sure looks good, though.

 

   The plan was to build a board tracker-style bike that would be rideable even though it would definitely qualify as radical. Long and low with two tall wheels was the plan then and the stock Harley frame got its ass end cut off for the rigid drop seat addition to come.

The seat section was slammed down about as low as you can go without sitting lower than the top of the transmission and the rear was über stretched to get the 23-inch rear wheel from hitting the rider’s back. That’s low and long in anybody’s book. The fabbed-up trellis-like rear section is nicely integrated into the frame so much so that it’s hard to imagine it any other way. Smart use of tubing makes the whole frame look like a one-off and not a modified MotorCo chassis.

 

  Up front a cleaned-up set of Harley forks with in-your-face triple trees stands out unfettered in an utterly simplistic forky way and then I realized why ─ there’s no headlight. Actually, there’re a couple of small lights cleanly mounted at the bottom curves of the twin downtube frame and apparently that’s enough to keep the North Carolina DMV happy. It surely does change the look of the front end with the black spoke, brakeless, tall front wheel dominating the view with the simplistically elegant fork legs and triple trees adding to the “something’s different” design drama. Same wheel stuff goes for the rear except there’s a single disc with twin calipers ready to grab the rotor on a skidding tire notice. Top it off with the Combat-fabbed flat swept-back bar with bar-end control levers and you’ve got a look and a riding position that fits the rad board tracker-style both aesthetically and functionally.

 

  Besides all the other fabrication he had to do during the short time allotted, Pig (sometimes known as Scott) fabbed up the dual purpose fuel/oil tank with a decidedly vintage board track-style look. It is exactly where it has to be in the somewhat limited space over the engine with defining points at the head stock and the vertically angled tube that at the front of the how-low-can-you-go seating platform. It keeps the lines crisp and flowing with an invisible line that extends from the top to the back of the tank to the rear axle. It may be invisible, but you can see it without trying to and that’s good. A simple tire-hugging rear fender completes the bodywork with a grenade LED taillight mounted jauntily at its peak. Why a grenade? Probably because Jim liked it and that’s good enough for him. He does what he wants on all his bikes and that’s what makes them striking.

 

   For paint, Jim went what I’d call candy apple red with light crème panels on the tank sporting gold leaf Combat Cycles graphics. Nothing gaudy or over the top for TV, just classy color combos that go well with all the brass highlights throughout the bike and the black and chrome pieces scattered all over the bike. It looks nice and that’s a compliment.

Whenever I see a bike I like, the first thought that comes to my head is “That’s nice” and believe me that covers a lot. This bike is nice.

   

    Getting back to where this story started, you might have noticed that one of the attached videos is the full BikerLive: Tar Heel State episode that you just might enjoy watching if you’ve never seen the show or even as a refresher if you did. Go ahead and watch it and tell me you don’t get good vibes coming from Combat’s head guy, Jim Moran. To me, he’s about as comfortable in his own shoes as a man can get and I think that’s from doing what he likes and doing it well, very well. You gotta give a guy a lot of credit for staying true to himself and what he believes is right. There’s an honesty in Combat’s builds and I think that comes right from the top.

 

For more information on Jim, Pig and Dave and what they’re up to lately, check out Combat’s web site http://www.combatcycles.com/or visit Combat’s Facebook page.