All three of these fine fellows have graced Barnett’s Magazine Online with personal builds, but never in cahoots with each other in one big bowl of motorcycle Chex mix. Such is not the case in this whacky-doodle Brit twin custom that features just about every intricately insane, but groovy ‘60s and ‘70s chopper styling elements on one platform. Go ahead, check out Jack’s photo gallery and tell me where there’s something not going on that probably didn’t happen sometime somewhere 40 or 50 years ago. Sure, you might remember this piece from one bike you saw and that idea on another, but where did you see every single mod, every single part, every single idea on ONE bike?
Some things Gary took great liberties with like the not-reversed, but it sure looks like it head sitting on those twin vertical cylinders. People today still love to go to all the trouble of reversing a head with all the machine work it entails, but Gary took a different route. Why bother reversing the head when you can just basically reverse everything else instead? Long, long inlet manifolds put the twin carbs upfront in the ram-air breeze while the twin header-wrapped exhaust snakes back, around, and tight to the lower frame lines until the find the twin chromey fishtails to dump out into. They’re just having fun and making a racket cause they can.
The frame is caught in its own Willy Wonka funkified mess of tubing with absolutely unnecessary, but whacky cool metal filigree work doing its thing whether it’s holding on a fender or sticking the neck out with attitude just because someone with a welder thought that that was the absolute best solution to a problem nobody knew existed. But whoever had the cutting tools and welder had the final say whether it was forming and re-inventing a Mustang-style tank into an organic fuel cell made out of metal, rod, and filler all doused in paint. Methinks Lord Finch may have had something to do with the paintjob, although I’m totally speculating.
Oh there are other cool period pieces like the painted Invader wheels that stop courtesy of Triumph’s way-ahead-of-its-time unintended sprocket brake/sprotor setup bolted to the rear Invader. Of course, if you check it out, you’ll see it’s an ancient Triumph drum brake/sprocket gizmo and not something involving a caliper and sprocket rotor by Russell Mitchell or HHI. Up front, there’s a darling little drum setup on the wheel that was a pretty rare bird for its day. I don’t imagine it does a lot other than start conversations, but a 4.3” drum is about Rupp mini-bike size and I don’t quite remember any mini-bike scaring me with its stopping power. Still, better than nothing and pretty damn cool just because who else has one?
And yeah, you gotta have a springer front end controlled by a set of pullback bars built from many feet of tubing but only about a foot of width. All of this wouldn’t be worth anything with a big, personal sissy bar and of course, a seat fit for a local king and queen. Having a diamond pleated seat covering in ridiculously awesome white reaching up to the tip of the needlessly awesome sissy bar height a makes sense if you spent some time in the swinging sixties. If not, you’ll just have to make your own memories and tell a fib or two to yourself about what it was like living in the era.
All in all, this is just one fun, crazy fun trip back to when this was serious shit. Kustom Inc’s Gary Maurer deserves a good pat of the back for purposely bringing the fun back into a game that could use all the fun it can. As far as the other two Rons, I bet they all had a lovely time just chuckling about this whole build from a time and a place that’s hard to believe ever existed. I’m just glad they all got together and did whatever they had to do to come up with something this crazy cool.