In the meantime, one emailer/later phone caller brought up an interesting point and that had to do with the lack of custom trikes out there and his solution for it. As anyone with a pulse and an interest in custom bikes knows, there’s a glut of low (really, really low in most cases) mileage, basically brand new custom bikes from the crazed early 2000s gotta-have-a-chopper-like-on-TV era holding up garages more than anything else. After the initial hey-look-at-me-factor had worn off, either they were too hard for owners to handle or they just weren’t all that fun to ride and that only cemented their status as static garage queens.
What this reader suggested was that these ultra customs would make a good basis/donor bike for a custom trike for many reasons other than the previously mentioned low mileage. I realized that whenever I think of a bike being converted into a trike, I think of Ultras, Sportsters, and a few Softails (Springers mostly). In other words, it ends up as a basically stock Motor Company model with all the trike stuff thrown at it. I can almost here Chief Wiggum’s “All right folks, show’s over, nothing to see here” catchphrase being part and parcel of a stock trike after the three-wheel novelty has worn off on bystanders.
He had a litany of ideas about why they could be the perfect donor from big-inch S&S engines to highway-cruising 6-speeds (which most seem to have) to big leverage handlebars and more. The fact that you can pick up yesterday’s wild, but still nearly new custom for a song (actually, more like a jingle now) was what got him to thinking about this in the first place. Instead of buying a new Harley to convert or picking up one of The Motor Company’s production trikes and then spending mucho dinero customizing it, why not just start with something radical in the first place and hopefully cut out some cost?
It makes sense in a way that spending money on customizing anything makes sense, now that you’ve saved some money you’ll have more to spend. There are companies out there like Frankenstein Trikes that can provide a rear end you can hopefully either bolt-on/adapt to a Softail-style custom or with a bit of ingenuity (isn’t that what custom really means?), could be fitted to a hardtail custom without too much of a problem. The reader mentioned that he had worked on cars and didn’t have any fear that he couldn’t use the same skill sets and make a trike pretty easily. What he actually was looking for I think was why nobody else seemed to be doing it. I gotta admit I didn’t have a good answer, but he did make me wonder why this approach wasn’t being taken at least a little bit.
When I looked back over our photo galleries, I couldn’t help but notice this custom trike built by Wayne Cothran of Wicked Willys Choppers in Taylorsville, North Carolina. The more I looked at it, the more it looked like a blue print for what the reader was suggesting. Now you wouldn’t have to worry about a radical two-wheeled custom’s possible wheel flop from a long front end or being ever so careful making a U-turn with radical geometry and a big rear tire or pulling out into traffic from a side street with a 300 out back or being afraid of using a foot-clutch and hand shifter and possible consequences. You could now easily ride down Daytona’s Main Street without too much fear of looking like an idiot on a bike you couldn’t handle. That alone would be worth the lack of humiliation I’ve seen on the faces of riders who lost control turning around or trying to finagle a foot clutch/hand shift setup in front of a crowd.
So what so you think? Is the person who brought this idea up a genius or a dreamer? What say you?