I’m not a big wheel bagger freak by any means, but I’ll tell you why I just love this bagger and I hope it doesn’t sound insulting in any way; it really looks ready for the York assembly line. If Harley made a CVO Road King just like this, they’d sell a ton of them. It would have to be exactly like this, though, cause there’s just not anything I can see that needs fixing. That damn beautiful thing looks ready to hop on and ride until the credit card says to go home.

 

   This is not the first time Barnett’s Magazine Online’s featured a radically customized bagger from The Bike Exchange. We’ve also featured his 2013 Charlotte Easyriders Best of Show winner 2011 Street Glide a year ago and that was a stunner too. This is as good a time as any to let the cat out of the bag that The Bike Exchange did a two-fer with this lovely 2013 CVO Road King winning Best of Show at the 2014 Charlotte Easyriders Show. Lots of imagination along with a good bit of mechanical talent all topped with tasteful editing have helped to make The Bike Exchange a repeat winner in a hard fought class and they didn’t even use a 30-inch front wheel. That’s just a little 26-incher and it looks right.

 

    Somehow the Glenndyne Design Forged G7 26-inch front wheel sitting under a sporty-looking Fat Katz wrap-style front fender just doesn’t seem as cartoonishly big as a 30-incher and I’m not sure why, but visually it just works better. Maybe it’s the quite large Glenndyne Design 18-inch single front brake rotor (bigger than the stock 17-inch front wheel on a 2013 FLHR) that fills up the larger wheel better than the stock 11.5-inch rotors. Maybe it’s just all about proportions, but this combo works for me. Plus it’s going to stop on a proverbial dime with Glenndyne Design’s dual front brake caliper system.

 

  Hidden under the Topshop Baggers Viper Death stretched saddlebags and rear fender is a Glenndyne Design Forged G7 18-inch rear wheel, but unless you still have a pair of old comic book X-ray glasses in your junk draw, you’ll never know for sure. When it comes time for a builder to purchase bagger body pieces, it’s no surprise when they turn to CamTech Custom Baggers. In this instance, CamTech’s tank and side cover body kit along with their simply stunning chin spoiler and dash were chosen for their flowingly good looks.

 

 

   By now everybody realizes that you’ve got to do some serious frame work to properly locate and mount a big front wheel or you’ll experience a whole new handling hell and that’d where the fine folks at Hawg Halters Inc. come into play. HHI offers a neck rake builder’s kit that not only includes new frame pieces, but revised-rake tripe trees for a particular wheel’s size (23”, 26”, or 30” wheels) for the best possible real world handling.  Accentuating and accessing the new rake is a set of HHI’s 12-inch integrated bagger bars with custom HHI gripsI should point out that even though this bike is a show winner, The Bike Exchange built this bike with the clear intention of it being a motorcycle and not a trailer queen.

 

   Even though I knew it was a CVO Road King packing a pretty potent Screamin’Eagle 110-inch mill, the huge drag car-style AutoMeter tachometer packing a shift light mounted front and center always highlights somebody really into their performance. This time it was no different as The Bike Exchange exchanged the 110 for a Screamin’ Eagle 120R crate motor and if you don’t know, the “R” stands for “race.” A dead stock 110 makes about 85rwhp and 103 lb-ft of torque and that’s not bad, but the 120R ups the ante to roughly 125rwhp and 125 lb-ft of torque. Never mind numbers, your ass dyno would definitely register the increase in horsepower and torque as fabulous! What this baby’s making with the Glenndyne Skirt Flapper exhaust and The Bike Exchange’s tuning mods is only another plus. I should mention how much I liked the looks of the skinny stealth BDL belt drive that has all the virtues of a belt drive without the often clumsy, certainly massive looks of yesterday’s four-inch open belt drive. That thing could have a Harley P&A number on it and I wouldn’t be the least surprised it’s so clean and factory looking.

 

   Where this bike all comes together is in the final finish to me. The Bike Exchange Black Ops paintjob makes the bike in so many ways. The scheme is a wonderful flowing end to end design that Harley-Davidson should just steal and use on one of their special anniversary years. Personally, I prefer this one over any MotorCo anniversary or CVO paintjobs. It just looks like something that’s not going to grow dated and tired with age. All the legendary H-D silver, black and orange colors are on board with Screamin’ Eagle graphics that remind me of the wonderful shock value of the black and orange paintjob on the 2000 Screamin’ Eagle Road Glide, but with a lot more taste and subtlety. Bringing this design to creative totality is the Performance Machine engine cover kit, the Accutronix forward controls and Danny Gray seat which all feature orange highlights too. This bike just looks rich and refined and I absolutely love it.

 

  So Bike Exchange, what are you going to do now to one-up this beauty of a Road King for the 2015 Charlotte Easyriders Show? Two-in-a-row is nice, but a three-peat should virtually give you the award for life. I’m betting you can do it.

 

  For more info on The Bike Exchange, click on  http://thebikeexchange.net/ and enjoy the ride.