One of the unwritten, but often spoken, tenets of Exile Cycles is that you buy into the total Exile style which means you’ll never get a dragon infested paintjob or repeated trips to the chrome shop as part of your Exile build. Russell has worked out a formula he stays true to and doesn’t suffer fools trying to dick with it. If you want an Exile bike, you’ll get it. If you don’t, don’t waste his time. He doesn’t do this to try to be cool, he builds his bikes the way he does for a number of tried and true reasons, which inadvertently ends up making them cool. Ed Hinkle, owner of our feature bike Fat Bloke with a Sidecar, is the possible exception to the Exile rule. “Usually we’re pretty tough about giving the customers what they want, but this particular guy has bought plenty of bikes from us and I’m beyond the point of arguing with him these days. If he wants it, he gets it,” says Russell. “He gave me a list of requirements for this rig and that’s what he got. I don’t believe I’m used to hearing me say so, but this guy gets that luxury.”

I’ve never been crazy about fat rear tires, but for some unknown reason I’m totally enamored with fat front tires and the first Exile bike I ever saw in the flesh had just that. It left a lasting impression on me to this day and I can only congratulate Ed for picking this style as the basis for his sidecar rig. The softail frame harbors a now somewhat reasonably sized Avon 230mm mounted on a 7” wide Exile Monster wire-spoked wheel with a hefty looking Metzeler 200mm donut up front. The small 15” wheel diameter of both wheels plays out to make the tires look even more imposing than they really are with their tall sidewalls dwarfing the expected Scotch-Brited rims beneath. A low profile tire Exile bike would just look silly. The smooth looking, but beefy SJP Fat Glide forks are from the Exile parts line and look up to the task of handling any additional forces a sidecar might impose on them. Hidden in plain view is a steering damper that, “the owner was adamant that he wanted it, so he got it.” The frame’s modest 35-degree rake combined with Exile’s wide Monster handlebars makes maneuvering this rig around at low speeds an easy task. A single Exile four-piston caliper up front combined with their Sprocket Brake kit plumbed into another brake on the side car wheel using a common master cylinder, hauls this rig to a safe, quick stop.

Using a 124” TP Engineering engine with a JIMS 6-speed LSD tranny was a case of useful overkill to power this unit. Oftentimes bikes have to be geared down considerably when a sidecar is attached. “Those TP motors have got so much grunt and with six gears, the standard gearing was able to pull the sidecar without any issues at all,” says Russell. “The overall weight of the bike with a passenger isn’t out of the realm of normality compared to a standard dresser with a passenger and a motor making much less power.”

The star of this show, though, is actually not the bike but that Exile customized appendage hanging off the right side. The Motorvation Engineering Spyder sidecar doesn’t look like an add-on, but an integral part of this whole custom equation. Russell added a wheel, tire, and fender combo that nicely mimics the look of the rear wheel on Fat Bloke and the whole rig blends together for as a unified Exile custom, not an Exile bike with a sidecar slammed on. The Spyder has the look of a restored barn find instead of being a currently built unit. The rig is attached by four unobtrusive tabs mounted to the Exile frame and Russell says, “We tried to make it so that it could be converted back to a rideable bike. It wouldn’t be more than an hour with a couple of wrenches to get back to being a solo bike.”

In case you’re not familiar, Fat Bloke is one of the many comprehensive kits Russell offers ready for paint and assembly for a price that’s almost half the cost of a completed Exile bike. If this bike/sidecar combo caught your eye, let Exile know and I’m sure they’d weld up the tabs needed. “It would be interesting to see what the response is to this rig,” says Russell. “I was very happy with the way it turned out.”