HA! It all klicked in.......

On one of the message boards today, I used a quote from Jeff Leighton's article on Droopy's built and owned "...since '63 " Knuckle, from the April/May 2012 issue of Street Chopper, and some of my long-dormant brain cells clicked in, and I thought you'd enjoy this. First, the quote - now remember, this was in 1963:

"With the major parts purchased Droopy and his friend Paul Cerrato bought 2 pounds of hash (*my note: we ain't talkin' no Hormel brand here), and set out to build some choppers. Every time they would work on Droopy's Knucklehead, or Paul's 'four wheeler' (a trike with dual springer front ends) they would smoke out, and think up cool ways to build bikes.....".

I know you've seen countless photos of Droopy's purple Knuckle (if you haven't, search Droopy in any image search engine), but have you ever seen Paul's bike???

Well, you have now......Paul Cerrato's "Four Wheeler".

When I first saw Cerrato's bike feature in the July 1974 issue of Easyriders, I was totally taken away by it's sheer awsomeness. What would inspire somebody to build something like this....well, now you know!

Hey, did you catch the reefer plants embroidered on the back of the seat? 

Illegal substance-directed engineering.........a Model T front axle mounted to the frame neck, which is located with long hot rod hairpin radius rods, with two more frame necks welded where the axle spindles would be, holding two 15 over springers, steered with a set of tiller bars, which move the springers via a set of tubular drag links. Fuckin' A!

Derriere augmentation......

Day 2 on Shawn's frame. First thing I did was to make the spacer and internal sleeve to raise the backbone up another 1". It went in low, and way below the bend in the seatpost. This way it was more of a vertical lift. Putting it in the bent section of the seatpost would have raised the backbone, but it would have also moved the backbone back, which we didn't want to do.

Next, I cut the axle blocks from the upper section of  the frame, and shortened the lower rails by 2". I mated the axle blocks with the lower rails, then cut the upper rails just in front of the seat crossover tube. I moved to the L/H axle block, and trimmed off the remaining upper rail section, leaving about 1/2" of the rail for a socket for the internal sleeve.

Next, I made sure the upper rail section stubs were ground square, and then cut a new upper L/H frame rail, with the corresponding internal sleeves. I heated the L/H rail stub by the backbone, and pulled it up about a 1/4"-3/8" until it aligned with the replacement frame rail's new angle, and presto!

I slipped the internal sleeves inside the new rail, and was just about to get them into position, when Part-timer Steve showed up. He helped me get the sleeves tapped into place, then I plug welded the sleeves and rail into place. Once Steve was here, he jumped in and did the prep work and sleeves for the R/H side, and bending the stub into alignment, and setting the rail/sleeves, was a breeze on the right. Here's the results, and we have a straight 9 1/4" between the rails all the way down, just like before we modified it.......

Here's the profile view, a nice, straight shot to the axle blocks down the backbone....bye, bye dropseat section, and Shawn has just shy of another 2" of ground clearance, and 15" of backbone height for his monster motor to slide in and out from. Compare the upper rails now, to how they looked in my previous post.

The arrow in this photo is pointing to where we heated the top rail stubs to re-align them, you have to look hard to see they ever moved.

That's where we left off today. Shawn was over, and after seeing the new rear section, decided to keep the stretch in the backbone, and we're leaving the 38 degree neck angle alone, too.

Tomorrow (yeah, no rest for the wicked, but we have a killer TV to watch football while we work!) we're going to tackle rejoining the front downtubes with the neck, which looks a lot easier than it'll be. CDC bent the wishbones, then they sliced of about a 3rd of the radiuses off the insides of both downtubes, then welded them together, forming sort of a single tube with them. It was OK when they welded it all into position in the jig, but when we cut the neck loose, the downtube assembly sprung about an 1/8" to the left up top. We'll have to deal with that before we can do anything else.

One step beyond.......

Another frame for Shawn. He got a smokin' deal on a CDC/Bling Cycles frame, but on Shawn's initial mock-up, he ran into some running gear fitment roadblocks - and I stress not CDC's fault, they build a pretty nice frame.

See, Shawn wants to put a monster motor in here, and the backbone was a tight fit with a stock motor over the rear rocker box area. Also, clearance between the oil tank and the top of the transmission was close, and ground clearance with a 160/70-17 rear tire was about 3", so.........

We're going to shorten up the tail section 2" to lift the bottom of the frame - there's plenty of stretch back there to do it. Next, we'll add in 1" to the seatpost, and that'll give Shawn about 15" of clearance for his back cylinder, and take care of the oil tank issues. Then, we'll re-align the upper back legs to match.

Once that's finished, Steve and I will move to the front of the frame. looks like we're taking 2" out of the backbone stretch, re-align the front downtubes, and possibly taking 3 degrees out of the neck rake - we'll have to see once we get the front end on it.

Yeah, it's a lot of work you say, and why doesn't Shawn have somebody build him a frame to match his dimensions? Well, even with the labor to modify his frame + his initial cost, he's actually bucks ahead on the whole deal, and he can work with me to get exactly what he needs as far as fit and final bike profile goes.

And, speaking of profile........

Back in the August '07 issue of Street Chopper I had a nice 5 page feature article by Justin Schilling on a traditional fatbob-style bike I built for a client, titled Bringing Back Bob. 

http://www.streetchopperweb.com/features/0708_stcp_2006_special_construction_fatbob/viewall.html

In the article, Justin quoted me as saying:

"If someone were to ask you to name one style of custom motorcycle that you thought had been perfected over the years, your answer would have to be the timeless beauty and simplicity of the fatbob Harley. The combination of classic line and utilitarian road-ability of a fatbob-styled Harley-Davidson can't be denied."

I may have been a little ahead of the curve in '07, but I sure seem to see a lot of  guys that are long distance road trippin' on their customs ditching their little peanut tanks (and all their extra fuel bottles) in favor of a set of  fatbobs.

I know I've retro-fitted up quite a few 3.5, 4.2, and 5.0 gal. tanks for guys lately. It was inevitable, as everything that was old and time proven.....is new again to another generation of builders. During the gas crunch in the middle '70's, it seemed as if everyone was tossing their tiny tanks in the corner for a set of fatbobs. I'm seeing this style of bike coming full circle again.Yep, we're mounting a set of 4.2 Softail flatsides on Shawn's bike.

Kodachrome Thanksgiving.......

Wishing you, the faithful readers of Applied Machete, a bountiful Thanksgiving.

Oh, and if that actually was my family in this photo back in the early '60's......my Dad would be passed-out face first into that turkey, my Grandma would have already picked several fights with my Mom out in the kitchen, and my sister would have had the wheels of one of my friction-drive cars painfully wound into her hair by now.

Remember this goofy frame?

People ask me if the drugs back in the '60's were that good......I rest my case.

It started out as a Pan frame, then somebody added those elongated new wishbone downtubes (actually, all the way to the bottom seatpost crossover), that swooped forward half-way up to a sketchy Knuck bullneck. For good measure, they decided that the backbone should be 1 1/4" tubing to tie everything together, then there's those "mounts" hanging on the backbone - I was told the lower one was the top motor mount, and the upper was a coil mount (?).

Everything over the years on the frame from the seatpost-forward has been cut, bent, and welded over numerous times, but actually, the frame wasn't bad structurally overall, it just needed a lil' rehab.

The client wanted to keep some of the original "flavor" behind the old mods, but he needed to keep the rake about the same, because he has a vintage long Denvers springer to use. All I have left on the frame is to do is the splice welds, and to make a nice triangulated top motor mount from 1" tubing for it.

I replaced the old downtubes with straight ones, went back to the 1 1/2" backbone, and slipped that over a short section of the old one at the seatpost, and ordered one of John's (Hardtail Choppers) OEM-style raked replacement necks for it. The client is thinking a set of OEM 3 1/2 gal. fatbobs on this, but that may change. Should be interesting......

Check out how sweet this neck is! John can do his OEM-style necks in any rake from 30 to 45 degrees. This one is a 40 degree. The raked necks take a little while longer to set up and cast, so keep that in mind if you order one.

The only difference between this casting and his standard 30 degree neck, is that there isn't any lock boss on the other side of the neck, both sides look the same as the photo above. 

Give John a call if you're interested in one of these OEM-style, pre-raked necks. Make sure you tell him you saw it on my blog:

http://www.hardtailchoppers.com/