Lexington, North Carolina, proclaims it’s “The Barbeque Capital of the World” and with 20-some BBQ joints in a city of only 18,000 people, they might be right. But, if the smoked meat purveyors don’t watch their backs it may soon also be “The Fat Motorcycle Tire Capital of the World” if Dave’s shop, Garwood Custom Cycles, has its way. Now that I think of it, maybe these two “Capitals of the World” have something in common. All that good barbeque available just might make a hard core BBQ junkie’s ass look smaller when it’s sitting over a 360mm wide rear tire and another 360 up front might help with looking a bit slimmer too. One thing’s for sure, if you’re a fat guy on this bike who’s too conscious of it, rest assured, nobody will be looking at the fat guy, they’ll be checking out his ride.
The fat tire fetish at Garwood didn’t start with the short popularity on custom choppers, but on tricked-out, l-o-o-n-g swingarm Hayabusas and ZX-1400 hyper bikes with crazy paintjobs on their substantial bodywork. In other words, they’re extreme design, super fast Asian customs often involving as much work and money sunk into them as any Harley built for the show circuit. With a background in high performance, it’s no big surprise that Dave chose a 2012 V-Rod as his starting point. Many negative things have been said about V-Rods, but the performance of the Revolution engine was never one of them. There’s a small, but fanatical group of V-Rod owners who like to take a different custom approach to building an eye catcher and Garwood Custom Cycles is right there to make their dream come true.
The experience of building all those long and wide hyper bike swing arms definitely came in handy when doing over this V-Rod as a lot of the same principles apply. Matter of fact, when I first saw this bike I knew who built it because Barnett’s Magazine Online had done a feature on another fat tire V-Rod Dave built a while back and if you’d like to take a look at it, just click here.
Since that one, Dave’s upped the ante quite a bit in bodywork and bling while still showcasing what have to be the widest V-Rod forks in the world. Just look at those things and realize how much time and effort went into building a set of triple trees that are more like beautiful bridge trusses that a typical tree’s now wimpy dimensions. That’s a big ass chunk of aluminum that spent a lot of time being machined, but it does almost provide a car grill affect with all that shine radiating all over the front end.
Sandwiched between the trees is a pair of off-road bar-style LED headlights only this bike could wear and get away with it. It was a small stoke of style genius that fits in and modern enough to appeal to a techie V-Rodder. A couple of dozen LED lights should provide more than sufficient night time illumination as well as making you wonder what the hell is coming down the street. I have no idea if that’s legal for road use or not, but this bike has a better chance of being pulled over by the police just so they could have a look at something they’ve never seen before and might not ever again. Sometimes being unusual has its own benefits.
The other major piece of work is that w-i-d-e swing arm made to fit around that mastodon of a rear tire. It finally answers the age old question of “Where’s the beef?” It’s all right there in that big box section of aluminum. From the side, it doesn’t look too different than stock. But, when you check it out from the back, you can’t help but notice how far out the shrouded chrome rear air shock top mounting point is from the frame. Those threaded lugs must be a good four-inches or so which might scare me a bit, but I’m sure this is nothing new for Garwood Custom Cycles so I’m assuming it’s all on the up and up.
If you did check out Dave’s other V-Rod custom you’ll see he did a lot more custom bodywork this time around. The faux fuel tank cover certainly isn’t a standard piece, but a whole new shape with lots of sculpturing this time around. The stock bar-mount V-Rod gauges have been molded right into a sculpted valley on the air box cover which you’d assume was a fuel tank, but isn’t. It’s a pretty wild shape that reminds me more of a flying bridge in a boat than anything else. A neat strip of large hole stainless flows down the middle of the valley and provides for some interesting bling that’s a perfect way of breaking up and tying the whole design together.
A very small, completely re-shaped rear fender with a LED taillight built into the tip provides a bit of a perch to mount the somewhat off-putting (to me) seat. I’m just not so sure about the solo seat’s design fitting in with the rest of the bike, but maybe if it were just a black covering I might be more okay with it. The red panel on the seat is a bit out of place to me anyway and is eye-jarring compared to the custom, yet Harley traditional orange and black with a dash of silver. Garwood has this bike on sale on its web site and strangely the list the color of this bike as black. Man, I’m going with orange as I bet there’s more orange acreage than black on this nutty-cool machine. I do like the paintjob as it is, it’s just that seat . . .
The drag style bars that are barely wider than the forks sure creates a riding position in conjunction with the forward controls that can’t be great on the old spine, but I guess it gives you some crazy ass street cred and I think that’s what a custom bike like this is all about. The heavily chromed tri spoke wheels almost look like one of Billy Lane’s hub-less wheels being mounted so far inside the wide-wide rim. You almost have to look for them as they just get lost in the chrome rim. I don’t know if it was deliberate or not, but it’s a neat trick Dave pulled off.
Other than the exhaust and maybe a high flow air cleaner you’ll never see under the faux fuel tank, I’d venture that this 1250cc Revolution engine is pretty damn stock and that’s okay. It makes more than enough power stock for the use this bike will probably see. It’s tough enough when you’re trying to hoist a bike with a 360mm tire around a corner so I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like with two and a set of drag bars. But that’s all cool as this is not my bike anyway. If you’d like to make it yours, contact Dave at www.garwoodcustomcycles.com as it’s for sale. Unless you live in Lexington, North Carolina, you can be sure it’d be the only one in town.