No surprise then that old Jacko loves his white baggers even with all the multi-colored, multi-themed, airbrushed-to-a-fare-thee-well custom baggers he runs into at every show. Personally, I’d think after a while you’d be just looking for the wildest and most colorful paintjob on a bagger, but not Jack. It seems like any individual shot of a bike he just photographed he sends me for the heck of it is white with some single word comment like “Nice” or “Bitchin’.” The strange part is that he’s usually right.
Such is the case with the basically white 2005 Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic radical bagger built by Robert Snipes at Snipes Machine LLC in Kershaw, South Carolina. If the name sounds a bit familiar, we recently ran a feature on Snipes Machine’s multi-hued Street Glide called Trina that had a paintjob with seemingly every color except white. Funny, I don’t remember Jack commenting on that one ─ wonder if it was the color(s)?
Anyway, here’s another of the many radical show baggers Robert’s been turning out right and left or so it seems. He had four wild tourers at Charlotte Easyriders Show and believe it or not, there were two white ones (with different graphics of course) as part of his four bagger display. Luckily for him, this is not a spec build, but a sold bike with its new owner, William Waiters, waiting in the wings for the show circuit to end and get this back on the road.
I’ve got to give Robert or William a thumbs-up for having the cojones to take this bike to a whole new height of white. Sweet jeebers, even the block, cylinders, heads, and tranny are powdercoated white. Now that’s a statement you don’t see everyday, although they did temper it a bit with Diamond Cut Heads that you can barely see through all the bright reflected white light. Even the seat and back pad are white leather and that’s beyond my comprehension as I’d somehow stain and soil that in my first five minutes even being near the bike.
Robert and his crew at Snipes Machine, Brance Jenkins and Caleb Carnes, have done another masterful job of building a show-stopping bagger for William Waiters. There’s everything that’s expected on a radical show bagger including the 30-inch front wheel. By now, we take stuffing one of these giant hoops on a bike as simply standard fare, but the work in cutting and radically altering a frame to house a wheel this big is often taken for granted. I guarantee you that nobody cutting a late model bagger frame to fit one takes it for granted. It’s a lot of work to get things right and the results could be disastrous if care isn’t taken in every step.
Same goes for the rest of the air ride suspension, the heavily customized bodywork, hi-tech audio systems with all the wiring they entail, and, well, just fitting and making everything from the brakes to the engine work safely and smoothly. The quality of work at Snipes Machine is totally comparable with any, and I mean any, of the top builders out there. Robert seems to have a good handle on all of this just like you’d expect a good machinist to. That he’s also got a good handle on the design and look too says a lot about him being a multi-faceted builder whom we’ll be hearing more and more of as time goes by.
Could this be the right white bagger for Mr. Cofano? Maybe. Actually I think it’s missing a couple of things that he’d demand and no builder would ever think of incorporating into their design. What could be missing you ask? Well I know Jack pretty well and the only two things would be to substitute a giant white George Foreman grill for the Tour Pak (it kinda looks like one too) and to make the bags into mini-fridges. Hey, a real Italian guy like Jack has got to have his sausage and peppers and a frosty cold beer or a nice Chablis and these two mods would go a long way to keeping him ready for doing his job of bringing you the best bike show photos on the Internet ─ especially the white ones.
For more information about Snipes Machine, click on http://www.snipesmachine.com/ or visit Snipes Facebook page.