Most of the feature bikes we use have a name, but it usually has to do with a design theme the builder’s have chosen. Bail Money got its moniker by way of an event that happened years ago. “I went to high school with a cool guy named J.R. Dart, who was kind of a troublemaker, so his dad sent him off to boarding school across the country somewhere. Anyway, he calls me in the middle of night and tells me he broke out of the school and needed $1,600 to get home. I wired the money and he said he’d pay me back, but we lost touch after that. Ten or eleven years later he saw our Discovery Channel show and called us up and bought a couple of bikes from us. This was his first one, so we called it Bail Money, ‘cause we kinda bailed him out,” said Dave. “You know what’s cool about him? Well J.R. told us his price range, we talked about it a little bit, and then he said, ‘I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to know about it, just call me when it’s done.’ “ Done it is and it was not only cool, but smart of J.R. to let them spend all the time necessary to come up with a bike that’s simplistically striking in profile and full of delicious details upon closer inspection. “It was our first opportunity to do whatever we wanted, we spent more time on it than usual because we could, and now we’re doing the same with a bike we’re building for his wife,” said Dave.
The frame is a Detroit Bros. one-off rigid that has 1 ¾” stretch in the backbone, none in the downtubes, but has 41/2” added to the rear. It surrounds the engine in its own unique way, all sharp angles and such, and is kinda a drop seat style. The tubing extends rearward to the wheel while the tube that the one-off Progressive mountain bike seat shock sits on shoots back to hold the shorty fender up to the tire. Industrial looking 2” over SJP Swedish forks hang out at a modest 35 degrees and combined with the sensibly sized 160/80X16” Metzeler Marathons mounted on H-D Lightning wheels provides great road manners. Good manners are necessary as the big 121” Total Performance engine doesn’t have much to push around. A polished 45mm Mikuni carb with a nutty cool DB air cleaner supplies the mixture that Crane’s Hi-4 ignition blows up and it’s rammed through one of the most stylishly unstylish exhausts around. “I do countless drawings of everything I build. I drew up that exhaust and that was an idea I wanted to try. When I finally found 2” stainless flex tubing, I had to build it,” said Dave. Does that big muffler muffle? “A little bit…” says Dave. BDL was chosen for both the 3” open belt and clutch to transfer big-inch power to a Baker DD6 tranny with chain drive. Take a gander at the cool chain tensioner, nice mechanical design touch. PM brakes grab triple discs when things get out of control, which they apparently do as J.R. enjoys riding this bike hard and fast as well as the other three Detroit Bros. bikes he owns. ”J.R. lives 200 miles away from us, but he rides here, goes on a ride with us, and then rides home,” said Dave. “He’s a rider.” Attaboy J.R, ride the crap out of it.
Delicious details for last, like the swap-meet H-D Rapido tank that seems to have a life all its own on close inspection. The cylindrical oil tank is set within it and has hardware seemingly everywhere, while the grid work on top of the tank extends the busy details of the oil tank forward, and hoses casually bring their contents to where they’re needed without any need to hide from sight while they’re doing it. A simple black SJP headlight and DB one-off taillight provide the necessary elements to be able to go out and legally play. James made the hand-stitched leather seat perched atop the seat shock and Dave and James’s dad, John Kaye, sprayed the bike black where it wasn’t powdercoated. The Detroit Bros. Monkey bars on their BMX risers with Performance Machine hand controls flaunting their cables to the world and DB’s gnarly Bear-Trap pedal foot controls appear to be stylistic elements taken right from a kid’s BMX bike. Tough, simple, and cool. “The guys I grew up with, skateboarders, BMX guys, and kids that listen to punk music, get it. They get us and what we are doing,” states Dave. They’re not the only ones, Dave. You don’t have to be young to appreciate cool.
Builders: Detroit Bros.
The convoluted paths many builders take to get where they are can be as interesting as the bikes they’re building. James and Dave Kaye chose totally different vocations, yet ended up working together in a whole new field. James has a degree in art, sculpture to be specific, and Dave has a degree in business, but growing up with a dad who was into hot rods big-time probably fueled their interest in making outrageous customs. “We had always been into bikes and felt we had something new to say and in 2002, when James was working at Exile Cycles and I was a trader on the Options Exchange, we decided we wanted to build our own bikes. So we quit our jobs, moved home, and the rest is history,” said Dave. That history includes unique customs backed by a great line of parts and now the introduction of their own production bikes. “The production bikes are a way to get more Detroit Bros. bikes out on the street at a good price to the customer and still get a really cool bike,” says Dave, ”Our first model is like our Discovery bike, Revenge, and is priced under $30,000 with plans for one at $35,000 and a stripped-down hot rod at $25,000. Parts and bikes allow us the finances to build one-off bikes, which is what we really want to do.” Interested? Punch up www.detroitbros.com (especially check out their forum!) or call 248-542-5255.
This bike feature originally appeared in Barnett’s Magazine issue #50, September 2006.
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