Nathan Chaney of Alpena, Arkansas, is a spontaneous guy. He’s been known to wake up in the morning, get an urge to take a road trip, and 18 hours later, he’s in Florida. He builds the bikes he rides on these sojourns, and he rides them hard. Nowadays, most of his traveling is done on El Culo, his ’53 Harley chopper. He found the beat up, rusted frame in the weeds outside of his...

He designed, fabbed, and built the bike in his home garage in Salisbury. The custom paintjob, by Beth Swicegood of Painted Magic in Lexington, North Carolina, is comprised of faux painting on metal areas, the tank, the seat, and ammo box. Johnny says the build gave him no trouble at all. A man of few words, Johnny simply said the pipes are his favorite aspect of the bike. Johnny...

  Jack is the owner of JRM Cycles. Aside from building bikes and being an all service shop, he offers the innovative services of being a “mobile motorcycle mechanic.” That’s right, his mobile service truck if fully equipped to go to wherever you are for everything from emergency roadside service to towing to belt adjustments to tire change and balance....

  Here’s his story of how this custom Big Dog you’re looking at came to be. “My first wife died suddenly. We drove truck together and we came home on a Wednesday and she died on Thursday. I didn’t have any family where I was at, I don’t know, I was screwed up. I’ve been riding since ’81, but I didn’t have a bike at the time and one day I just decided to go buy another motorcycle,...

“I think I built this bike in ’05, ’06,” he said. “My signature orange and white bike I had worn out; the lower end, the rods were worn out, the heads were worn out. Nothing was abused; it was just worn out because I had ridden it for ten years. I needed something, so I built this bike. It’s a throwback to my beginnings, sort of, because we...

  Hell’s Kitchen is a name to be remembered. The history of the chopper, as we know it, started with the movie Easy Rider in 1969, but Hell’s Kitchen is much older. Just the bright and colorful choppers in Easy Rider, the history of the real Hell’s Kitchen — the neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City that covers roughly the area from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River — started in...

  If you’re looking for a Frisco-style chopper, where better to look than San Francisco itself and in this case, our feature bike, Frisco-Style, by California Choppers located on 1490 Howard Street, right in the heart of San Francisco. Owner Wayne Hodges has the skinny on these skinny bikes as he not only works there, but was born and raised there too so I’d think it would be fair...

  Marcus bought this bike as a basket, with most of the parts there but in bare metal, primer, and some rust: your typical grab bag. What turned out not to be typical was that at some point this bike was a Chandler Original, either a kit or a disassembled bike owned or built by Adam Chandler. Not only stickers, but the title showed this to be true. After about six months of...

  Vince Vaccaro drag raced on the street and track until recent years, when he felt like his reflexes were no longer as sharp as they should be for a sport where a micro-second flick of a wrist can mean the difference between winning and losing your pink slip, or your life. Vaccaro has been a realtor for 40 years, all of it in Phoenix, where he said he has sold some 2,000 homes. He...

Something Old “Back in the early ‘90s, I was working with Kevin Starke in Canada who was making frames and boy, the quality was there. We sold a ton of his Softail frames back in the ‘90s. He called me up one day and said, ‘I’ve got an idea for a rubber-mount Softail using an FXR drivetrain.’ Kevin did this one frame for me that we had fun with, it had a gooseneck and some rake and...