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They probably the same reaction you had when you first laid eyes on this bike, “What the hell is that?” As far as others’ reactions, Mark said, “People come up to you grinning, it makes people smile. Everybody, they just love it, even the Harley people. I’ve had people follow me into gas stations, wherever I pull off the road, they just follow me. They want to know what it is and how old it is. I tell them it’s three-years old and they say, ‘What?’ “ What it is is a very highly-modified Suzuki Savage 650cc single basically using only the lump of an engine and the frame cradle that originally surrounded it. Everything else is as creatively modified and fabbed as Mark found time. “It took me a year to build it and that’s afternoons and some weekends and I was doing other stuff too,” he said. “I found this bike on eBay down in Houston and it had that girder front end on it. It was a piece of junk. They had a threaded rod for an axle and threaded rod for the steering.” Mark did like the big Suzuki single engine because it was proven and clean design with no brand markings stamped all over it helping with the old bike subterfuge.

Mark had been looking at vintage bikes and poring over books on old bikes and one in particular caught his eye. “I was looking at a 1926 Indian single- cylinder, a beginner’s bike, and I really liked the style and tried to pattern it a little like that,” he said. “I built it in segments and tried to detail and get those pieces so everywhere you look it’s sorta neat. I wanted to keep the bike clean and it’s a lot of work to achieve clean. I kept the engine cradle and the swingarm, but I did modify the swingarm into a mono-shock suspension.” After building an upper frame off the swingarm, Mark adapted a shock from a Yamaha R6 that fit all the proper length and spring requirements.

Up front, Mark went to work on the girder fork removing the dreaded threaded rod wherever it lay and cutting off the lower legs which were chopper-long and saving the removed pieces which later became the side rails for his slatted Hickory wood rack. “The pointed chrome bolts at the back of the rack, that’s where the axle was,” said Mark. As far as the fork itself, he said, “It had just a spring and I cut those mounts out and put a Fox mountain bike shock in there. I re-bushed it and put all new hardware on it and had it chromed.” The brakeless 21” front wheel was laced with stainless spokes by The Wheel Right Shop in Thomasville, North Carolina, who also did the rear wheel. When I questioned the sanity of using just a rear drum brake in 2010, Mark replied, “You’ve got the drag of the rear wheel whether it’s the engine or the brake, I’ve raced bikes for years and years so I’m real comfortable on a bike and I just give myself really good gaps.”

The engine came next and he left it internally stock, but did put a 34mm Mikuni flat-slide carb on it using a Fernco plumbing fitting as the basis of an air cleaner. Mark continued his imaginative handyman ways explaining the rest of the induction system, “At Lowe’s I found a fish grill, a perforated plate in stainless and I just rolled that and made the outside jacket. I took a foam filter that fitted on my Fernco 90 so it’s two separate pieces. The little bottom pipe holds the metal cage, the perforated part, and the rubber goes down through the top plate I made and floats in there. Underneath that I made a little plate that sorta covers up the front of the swingarm and holds it in place.” The newly-chromed exhaust uses the original head pipe and Mark welded a turnout on a universal muffler and said, “I had to put some perforated material up into the muffler because it was breathing too good. It didn’t have a bit of torque and I had to torque it up some.”

When it came time for making the bodywork, Mark didn’t farm that out and said, “That was my first tank. I’m a welder by trade and I know how to fabricate. It took me a month to build it. I live at the beach and they put pilings under your house so I took 18-guage steel and an 8 x 8 timber and shaped some radius on that timber.” Originally he wanted to run a frame rail over the tank and explained, “But there was no way to meet the frame up there around the steering tube so I just put a piece of flat bar and took an iron work punch out and tapped on it so it looks like rivets. That’s all that is for ― aesthetics.”

Fenders were a different story. “I saw Hank Young make fenders from spare tire rings and that’s what this is, a 29 Model A spare tire ring I bought off eBay for $35. It’s a complete circle and I got both fenders out of it,” said Mark. “The rear is the actual width of it and I ended up taking some muffler pipe and coming out making my mounts for the two ’59 Cadillac taillights. The front, I cut the center out and welded it back together and just used flat bar for mounts.”

As far as painting the bike, Mark said, “I was going to try to paint it myself in my garage, but the humidity down here is so bad that I couldn’t get it to work.” Martin’s Auto Rebuilders in nearby Southport handled the black base coat for him and the tank graphics took an interesting turn. “That’s actually a decal! I gave it to a graphics design guy and he made me the crème-colored stickers with Island Rocket and red pinstriping which I clear-coated over it.” He also did the little “618” number plate on the front fender and I asked Mark if there was any significance to that number. “That was my motocross number when I raced the ‘70s through the ‘80s. I raced motocross and flat track and in the early ‘80s I started running hare scrambles up until about ’89,” said Mark. “Actually the last race I won was in 2006, that was my last race and I retired after that. I won a couple of state championships and I did pretty good at flat tracking. I had a guy tell me that the little plate I put on the front is called a “pedestrian catcher” in Europe.”

If you’ve been following along so far that just about everything was made by Mark, it’s no big surprise that he made his own seat pan out of stainless steel and cut his own foam before having it covered by his friend Doyle Loflin or that he wired the whole bike from zero and built a neat switch for ignition and lights under the seat or built the sanitary stainless battery box at the base of the downtubes or made his own floorboards from aluminum stock and truck mud flaps or . . .

The part I like best about Mark’s bike is that it’s used as a motorcycle as well as a conversation starter. “I ride it back and forth to work. I live about 15 miles from work and I also like to putt around the island on weekends,” said Mark. “I’ve had it to 70 on the highway, but I don’t use it for long distances. I’ve got about 5,500 miles on it. When you ride it, it takes you back like you were riding in the ‘20s.”

So what do you do for an encore to a custom motorcycle that keeps everyone guessing? Mark matter-of-factly said, “This winter I’m building a bicycle to match it.”