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This bike appears in the upcoming 2011 Iron & Lace Calendar available after July 1st at www.fastdates.com. This is a spiral bound, 15” x 15” color calendar with photography by Jim Giatnasis, one of motorcycling’s premier photographers. He is also the man behind the L.A. Calendar Motorcycle Show. This year’s show is July 18th, next to the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

Yup, Chris is one of those multi-talented, intelligent, highly articulate, really down to earth guys I just love to hate out of shear jealousy. Armed with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Chris nicely padded his resume with a Masters in Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, before eventually moving to Seattle and becoming head designer for an avant-garde furniture design and manufacturing company, Gulassa and Co. Inc and starting Speed Shop Design ten years ago. The two schools provided an interesting background for a custom motorcycle builder to work from as Chris said, “As an undergraduate, I actually studied high metalsmithing, doing jewelry, and raising vessels [No, not boats. Raising vessels is taking a flat sheet of metal and making it into more of a three-dimensional item like a bowl] and I was also a painter and an illustrator for a short while. When I went to graduate school, I focused on bicycle building and furniture design.”

The bicycle building aspect of his “education” became an important part of what was to come at Speed Shop Design. Working as a painter for legendary bicycle frame builder, Ted Wojcik, Chris learned the importance of not only making a structurally strong weld with ultra-thin materials, but a beautiful one too. “I just started watching Ted more and I had a friend at Fat City Cycles [Boston’s (actually Somerville) high-end Fat Chance bicycles] which was known for its great welds who taught me how to weld like that. On the bike I’m building now, I’m pre-polishing a fair amount of stainless before I weld them together so you can see my welds on it,” said Chris. “I know there’s a lot of people out there that learn welding because they want to stick metal pieces together, but they never take it any further.” Between painting and welding bicycle frames, he had made a very practical move that along with his artistic talent gave him a strong, definitive background to work from in building custom motorcycles.

Explaining the thought that went into the design of SSD #6, he said, “I’ve always liked the simplicity of bicycles, when you look at this bike without an engine in it, it looks like a bicycle frame. It has a chain stay loop, a seat stay loop, and a seat tube. It’s not acting as a seat tube and it just happens that with a Sportster you need a seat tube in there to help with the bracketry in the back of the motor.”

Why an Ironhead Sportster for propulsion? “A lot of people poo-poo the Sportster motor, but to me it makes a lot of sense. You have unit construction which makes it a lot lighter and stronger and you can rely on it for strength in the frame itself as a stressed member,” said Chris. “I tried not to let too many things influence me. The biggest influence in the build for me aesthetically as far as a belief system would be like the Zero chopper spirit look when it first came out. That aesthetic and that style really rang true with me. A lot of people do heavily-modified frames, but I like the freedom that designing and making a frame gave me.”

What a knockout frame he ended up with. “I had a photograph of a side view of an engine and I drew around it on paper. Basically what I did was make a template on a piece of plywood and went down to the boiler works where they can bend big tubing and they bent the down tube for me,” said Chris. The gooseneck area is simply stunning with a light touch of gusseting where the down and top tubes come together at the steering head. There’s no issue with strength in this design as he said, “The wall thickness is .120 wall so it’s 1/8” thick and it’s two-inch tubing so there’s a huge amount of weld surface where the down tube and head tube meet.” The down tube is beefy looking and delicate the same time with curves that look comfortable doing their business while the rigid rear section is strictly simple and clean.

Don’t go looking for that fork in your Drag catalog as that’s a Chris-one-off. “The first year I rode the bike, I actually had a raked, telescoping front end, totally traditional. It was raked out so much it wasn’t telescoping anymore, just flexing,” he said laughing. “I had this idea in my sketch book for a couple of years. Being in the bicycle industry, I loved designing full-suspension bicycles so my brain was always working on linkages and how you can do things a little differently with suspension. I always like the simplicity of early Honda forks [‘60s Honda pressed-steel leading-link or sometimes called bottom-link], basically my concept is no different, just a hell of a lot beefier. I went through a number off springs before I figured it out.”

One of the pieces I really admire are Chris’ tank mounts. The organic look of metal bending around graciously while holding the tank is place is simply stunning. “I was having a hard time figuring out how to hide the tank mounts. I was like, ‘Why kill myself trying to hide these things, why not make ‘em a focal point?’ and that’s when I came up with the little rubber mounts on the outside,” said Chris. “I had a lot of fun building them.”

There are so many nice touches like the tank mounts throughout the bike you really gotta spend some time looking at the pictures closely to catch all the little Chris-tricks everywhere. It may be just me, but the handlebars and controls are as they used to say when it was hip, “Sweet” and all Chris can say is, “I don’t know how to make them any simpler.” Another high point is the integrated headlight and horn on the fork. “That was an afterthought and when the horn ended up there, it started to take on an early locomotive look.” I also can’t help checking out the kickass kicker Chris made that looks like it’d take no sh*t from an uncooperative Ironhead and start in spite of any problems. And, to go back to the bicycle background, it looks like a high-end bicycle crank arm. Then there’s the arching multi-holed seat mount with linkage to a mountain-bike shock and matching holed chain guard, or the antique-style oil tank, or the elegant fender stay and tag bracket, or the. . . Well you get the picture, it’s all good.

Chris is still banging away at his furniture job and working on a new bike at Speed Shop. Like any true artist, what they’ve already done is past history and they strive to do better and then better again and Chris proves that point with, “I like my new bike so much better than this one right now. It’s something I love to do and I feel like I’m getting better. I’m having fun learning and growing and I want to make sure that keeps happening.”

Keeping him on the cutting edge of motorcycle design is a different philosophy of business that keeps him from having a narrow focus. “Speed Shop will never be just a motorcycle design shop. I recently did an espresso machine that’s just kind of going crazy. I really like doing stuff like that too and a lot of my furniture has similar details,” said Chris. “If I narrowed my focus to just bikes, I think my bikes would lose some of their interest. I need to stay multi-faceted to stay interesting. Does that make sense?” All I can say is that it does Chris and the proof is in your Speed Shop Special #6 pudding.

This gem of a bike is for sale at a way more than reasonable price in my opinion. It’s a street-proven (he rode it for a year on the streets of Seattle to iron out any bugs) show winner of timeless design that you could be firing up for a ride out of your garage at a price of a mass-produced production custom. Let me think, which one would I rather have?

For more information on Speed Shop Design, visit www.speedshopdesign.com or give Chris a call at 206-351-5315.