Richard Parra is one of the few people I know who rides to work, and it’s no stock bike, he’s got a custom chopper that he built with his own two hands. His first bike was a ’77 Sportster, but life prevented him from getting another one until he bought a used 2001 black and yellow 1200 from a friend late in that same calendar year. “My buddy dropped the bike within the first 100 miles, but he had most of it repaired. I knew I could fix any potential problems it might have after the accident,” Richard said. Not that it mattered, within two months of owning the bike Richard developed an irresistible urge to modify the crap out of it. So he parked the bike on a lift in his garage and started taking it apart.

As this was to be his personal bike, Richard wanted to maintain the reliability of the stock motor and pair it with the styling of a chopper. He didn’t want to worry about buying octane booster for a high-compression motor and he wanted the bike to start on the first try without having to buy a high-torque starter for a big-inch motor. He had no qualms about modifying the fresh from the factory Sportster foundation, and started chopping it as soon as it was stripped bare. Enlisting the help of a friend nicknamed Bones, they built a homemade frame jig and prepared to create a traditionally styled chopper by lengthening the down tubes and backbone three-inches with a 36-degree raked steering neck. “I did all the work on the bike by myself except the frame mods, I didn’t have much experience at the time and I wanted some guidance to make sure it was set up properly. Bones is a life long biker, he’s been welding for 30-years and I knew he’d teach me the correct and safe way to chop the frame,” Richard said. Like many builds, he ended up modifying more than he originally planned. He thought a big twin barrel-style oil bag might fit between the seat post and rear fender section, but found the space was too small. He fixed the problem by using an oval-shaped oil tank from NYC choppers and moved the seat post so it would fit. He had seen a Drag Specialties wide tire Sportster kit and thought the added meat in the rear would look great and ordered it hoping it would bolt on, but that wasn’t the case. The kit required the relocation of the rear fender struts and he had to severely chop a West Coast Chopper rear fender in order to fit the wide swing arm and 180mm tire.

Once the frame was chopped to Richard’s satisfaction, he focused on how the bike would handle on the road. His calculations for the length of the front end suggested that he needed something built eight-inches longer than stock, but when he bolted it to the frame something felt wrong. “The front end flopped from side to side, but I figured out how to correct the bike’s trail with a set of billet triple trees raked an extra six-degrees,” he said. With a new total of 42 degrees of rake, the trail was a hair’s breadth shy of four-inches — a number that many frame and front-end manufacturers claim is the ideal.

About a year after he pulled the motor from the stock frame, plus a thousand bolt-on upgrades and less extensive mods later, Richard had the bike he hoped for: a reliable Sportster chopper whose parts fit together so well, a person might think it was designed by Harley. He rides the bike all the time, in fact, this bike got into the magazine because Mark Barnett noticed Richard and his bike cruising on the freeway in El Paso during rush hour traffic. Gas mileage and riding experience aside, riding on a daily basis can pay off, especially on a Sportster chopper in El Paso, Texas.