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Timeless Motor Company is the lovechild of Mike Hanlon who (along with his brother Tim) owns El Paso’s famed custom fork purveyor, Mean Street Products. Timeless is a new division of Mean Street that was founded on Mike’s classic bike passion that led to him making a most accurate replica of the legendary 1910 Harley-Davidson 8A Silent Gray Fellow that you can buy, maintain, and admire without selling your house or your soul. Not only can you buy a sit-up-and-beg Timeless Classic Street Bike replica, but you can indulge your leather-helmeted vintage racing fantasies with the more aggressively-styled Timeless Classic Board Track replica.

How this all came to be is an interesting story in itself. “I’ve always been a motorhead and I’m a mold maker. I saw a picture of one of those 1910 board trackers one day and I don’t know why, but I had a wild hair to build that motor,” said Mike. “I went on the Internet begging for parts, I’d say ‘You loan one of your cylinders or cases or whatever and I will send you back your part and send you a brand new part’ which they can’t get anywhere. Due to the power of Mean Street forks, people believed me that I would do it. Then all of a sudden about four-ish years ago, there came a big craze in the Harley custom market to build a board track racer. Everybody started to go to bike shows with a board track racer replica bike. So the craze was there, so I said, ‘I tell you what, I’m going to finish this thing.’ Within a year and a quarter, we came out with both bikes and off we went.”

What Mike made is a close-to-exact reproduction of a 1910 H-D single with items like a cast bronze carburetor, sand cast aluminum cases (with an option of gorgeous nickel plating), sand cast iron cylinders, a cast muffler on the Street Bike with a manual straight-pipe exhaust cutout for those times when you’re feeling a bit of a hooligan, and straight pipes on the Board Tracker as they were born a hooligan. Starting is like a moped, put it on the center stand and pedal away. The beautiful endless leather belt drive has a ratcheting clutch lever to engage the leather-lined rear wheel pulley and eventually spins the tall 28” white button-tread tires front and rear. If you see something shiny, it’s not brash chrome, but the warm tone of nickel plating that blends in harmoniously with the brass and bronze accents throughout. The handmade sprung leather seat sits aft of the Timeless logoed tank and looks timeless itself. Standard color choices are gray (most popular) and black just like the real one, but you can order it in any color you want. “In the beginning, people wanted red and blue and all sorts of stuff. By the time their bike gets almost ready to paint, they call up and go, ‘Oh no, don’t do that,’ everybody sucks in and goes, ‘I’ll do the gray,’ “ said Mike laughing a wee bit.

Timeless Motor Company is no one-trick pony and has recently come out with a second model for sale. “We’ve got a brand new 1903 Harley we’ve come out with, the original Harley that was ever made. We have that exactly duplicated, it’s unbelievable,” said Mike. “We don’t call it a Harley. We call it the 1903 Dream. It’s an incredible bike, a whole new tooled engine and everything.” But that’s not all that’s new. Hot on the heels of the 1903 Dream, Timeless is developing another model that will be more familiar looking to today’s V-twin rider. “One very cherished model is the 1911 V-twin ‘cause they only made like ten of ‘em. We’re going to do that one and we’ll be coming out with a board tracker version of it too,” said Mike. “We’re about two months away from finishing all the engine tooling and it should be out about mid-year.”

So who’s buying these replicas? “We sell a lot of them in Europe, they’re probably our main customer,” said Mike. “The exchange rate is just insane, it’s like one-third off and it only costs $600 to send a bike to Germany or France by air freight.” Now before you rush out and buy one for your next trip to Sturgis, just like 99.9% of 100 year-old bikes, the Timeless bikes are not meant to be street ridden. “We do have a disclaimer on our website that says no driving on the street ‘cause we can’t be liable for your safety,” said Mike.

If you just love old bikes, but your wallet isn’t quite as big as your appetite for them, check out the Timeless website (www.timelessmotorcompany) or give them a call at 915-592-6887 or email MPH3000@aol.com for more detailed info on all Mike’s mad replica motorcycles.