Tim Graham of Van Buren, Arkansas, has been riding cycles since 1972. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I started out on a damned Suzuki,” he said. A friend of his had a Super Glide and they used to go traveling together. One day, as they cruised around on their bikes, the friend said, “Boy, I’m going to teach you to ride. Here. Take mine.”
Tim took the Super Glide for a ride and it changed his life. “I’ve been a Harley man ever since,” he said.
He says he’s old, but is only fifty-five. “It’s not the number of years, but the high rate of speed that I used them,” he laughed. Tim has used them fast and rough. He’s worked in oil fields, foundries and steel mills. For years, he laid tile, until it got too hard on his body. “The eyes are going, the knees are going, the back’s going,” he said. With that in mind, he decided about a year ago to sell his beloved ’77 Night Train and try something a little more comfortable and a little less trouble.
“That Night Train was great—it had a stroker kit in it and everything. But it started getting to the point that every time I turned around it was breaking down,” Tim said. He went to see his friend Sonny White, owner of River City Cycle Works and told him what he was searching for. Soon after, a co-worker told Tim about a friend who had a Harley for sale and at the same time Sonny had found one, too. “I thought I was going to look at two different bikes. They turned out to be the same one,” Tim laughed. Obviously, it was meant to be, and Tim became the proud owner of a 1999 Fat Boy.
Sonny replaced the three-gallon tanks with five-gallon ones, added a new seat, changed out the pipes and, at first that was about it. “I told him, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it,’” Tim said.
One thing Tim did want to mess with was the cosmetics. He went to see painter Rod Stufflebeam to discuss the change. “It looked a lot different when I bought it. It was blue with yellow scallops.” Tim wanted a new look, but wanted Rod to choose the colors for the new paint. “You have to understand, my wardrobe is T-shirts and blue jeans—I cannot color coordinate,” Tim said.
Rod Stufflebeam, however, refused to make the decision. “It’s your bike, you have to pick it,” he told Tim. Tim agreed, but warned Rod that he might have to change the paint two or three times before they got it right, due to his color coordination impairment. All went well though, as you can see from the great-looking Jagermeister orange and deep purple design.
“The first time I went and looked at it, I fell in love with it,” Tim said.
The Fat Boy looks beautiful by the light of day, but it’s a sight to behold at night when the red-tinted ground lights are on. “They’re under the tanks, under the frame, under the front and rear fender, around the oil tank. When you light it up, you can see that thing coming a mile away,” said Tim. It’s one of his favorite features.
Tim rides the bike everywhere, and has put over 12,000 miles on it in a year, a lot when you consider that the bike was hospitalized for six months after an accident in which Tim said, “a FedEx truck tried to make a speed bump out of me.” The delivery truck turned in front of him, and Tim couldn’t avoid hitting him. “I ended up going under the truck.” The wreck caused more than $5000 worth of damage, and Sonny White had to do some major surgery on it, going in through the front end and replacing the primaries, floorboards, tanks — “everything.” It was broke this time, and Sonny messed with it.
Miraculously, Tim wasn’t seriously injured. “I’ve got a real hard head,” he laughed. “I bounced against the pavement, but I didn’t lose a drop of blood. I had headaches for about a month, but other than that, I got real lucky. Someone was looking out for me.”
Both Tim and the bike are now fine, and he reported that the only problem he has now with his H-D is “money.” The Fat Boy is an ongoing project, and Tim keeps adding customized touches.
“It’s not expensive to buy a Harley,” he explained. “It’s that once you buy one, you see all the stuff they come out with that you just gotta have. The lights, the pipes, the air filters; all kinds of stuff. It never fails. I go over to Sonny’s shop and I’ll look through the catalog and I’ll stumble across something. Before you know it, there goes some more dollars.”
Judging from the looks of things, it’s money well spent.
SPECIFICATIONS | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|