Flush with inspiration from the arrival of the jumbo engine, a scant six weeks later, Revolver was born. Named for the look of the holes bored around the diameter of the flat plates at the end of its custom wrapped pipes, Steve felt that they gave it the look of a revolver and that the no-nonsense, ready for action design of the bike would back up the claim.

As no standard frame would accommodate the engine, Stone determined that he would need to stretch his standard configuration of 4” up and 4” out. He opted for an oil-in-frame design, utilizing 2” tubing to house the massive mill. He tacked on his own flat, wide, and functional bars to guide the missile, as some leverage would be in order to bring her about when she was really being fed the throttle. With such a monstrous engine, he didn’t want to put a lot of rake into the performance; upside-down, Ceriani forks either, and ultimately determined that 34 degrees should do the trick. GMA dual disc brakes up front are charged with bringing a voice of reason to the festivities, and the front end culminates in a 3.5 X 18 PM Villain wheel, wrapped in a 120/90 X 18 Metzeler doughnut.

Out back, Steve opted for a tubular swingarm of his own design buffered by an artfully concealed set of Ohlins shocks. A PM disc brake lurks between the Baker right side chain drive and the mirror-like solid disc 8.5 X 18 Carriage Works rear wheel. Stone contemplated going as small as a 200 series tire profile for optimal handling, as it’s his personal philosophy that there’s “no excitement in a motorcycle you can’t drive.” But ultimately he conceded to a 240/40 X 18 Metzeler. As you can clearly see from Steve’s design decisions, he doesn’t take lightly the responsibility of putting somebody’s life in the hands of his creations. He expects Revolver to be ridden, and possibly even ridden hard, and while the gazers and gawkers might fail to appreciate details like the semi-agile frame geometry and the inclusion of exotic performance suspension components, some lucky owner will surely bear witness to Stone’s good judgment the first time he gets too happy with all that power and goes too hot into a decreasing radius sphincter-clencher. Let’s face it, when you’re out there flogging a bike with as much power as a small nuclear reactor . . . handling counts.

And while a plentiful supply of enriched uranium will keep a nuclear reactor happily aglow, the R&R 155” engine needs gas and oxygen, and is thusly stoked by an S&S Super with Thunderjets sucking wind through a gaping SMC Super Stack air cleaner. The R&R gang designed a custom ignition system to handle the duties of cranking over the whopping mill and Steve gleefully reports that it starts right up every time.

The SMC-built tins were kept simple, with the tapered, muscular, body builder-esque gas tank marking Revolver’s strongest stylistic statement. Originally, in an attempt to retain the clean, minimalist, rawness of the bike, Stone tried simply grinding down the tins and slapping a coat of clear on them, “I was trying to get just a nasty look to the bike.” Unsatisfied with the slight imperfections of the sanding marks, he decided that he wasn’t satisfied with the result and took off the clear coat, starting over. In the end, his in-house painter, Peter Petkauskos, took aluminum paint mixed with clear and coated the bike in that instead, which filled in the imperfections without sacrificing the mechanical look of the underlying metal. Peter wound up airbrushing the smoky skull graphic on the tank to further define Revolver’s image. Finishing the build, Stone added his own SMC foot controls and taillight but opted for H-D hand controls and a Headwinds lamp. All New Upholstery delivered on the shockingly-cushy-looking-for-a-custom SMC designed seat.

Stone couldn’t be more pleased with the end result, “The motor is just the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever driven. It scares me!” On Revolver’s maiden voyage, Steve got a first-hand taste of what a 155” powerplant churning out 185 hp and 220 ft-lbs of torque can do to your nerves.

“I thought I’d forgotten to tighten the rear axle ‘cause I shifted into third and ohhh that thing starts to get real squirrelly,” he said. “I looked back and saw smoke and thought, ‘jeez, the wheel must have cocked’ and that it was rubbing up against the fender or something. Come to find out, it’s got so much torque that the tire was just burning rubber. It was totally out of control. This was like at a quarter throttle. All of a sudden the damn thing hooked up and the front wheel just came up, maybe three feet off the ground. You can do that at any speed in any gear with this bike. I’ve built with a lot of big motors and I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life!”

And so, in the end, all good things come to he who waits . . . and begs . . . and grovels . . . and cajoles. And if you ask him now, Steve Stone will smile broadly and proudly declare that obtaining the freakish 155” R&R motor was worth every degrading, humiliating gesture . . . although I’m guessing his distant relatives and family pets just might beg to differ.