Builders used imagination and determination to fabricate machines that tested the limits of what technology allowed them.
Bordering on comfortable in seat 44D of a Delta flight bound for Atlanta, I turn off the video games, open up a Word document on my laptop, and turn my thoughts to the chopper world some 30 years ago. I have mentally traveled back in time thanks to a recent interview with Matt Hotch for our From The Builder's Side department. During that conversation, Matt spoke of his first Harley, a '69 XL Chopper with dual rectangular headlamps and a 12-inch-over fork -- very, very '70s he called it -- and my mind took off for times gone by.
I was only 10 in 1972, but I was as in tune with the motorcycle world as my mailbox let me be. It seemed that every other day one mag-azine or another was being dropped at my door -- all dealing with bikes. At the time I idolized Evel Knievel and desperately wanted a chopper. My Columbia three-speed bicycle that I delivered papers on had a quick-detach basket (three hose clamps) and a 14-inch-over fork. With every minute that the bike wasn't helping me earn $2.50 a week, it was a chopper. It was pretty cool blasting off for the gas station to fill up a can of fuel for my chopped mini-bike. While there, I would see guys with real choppers topping off tiny peanut tanks. They would acknowledge my bike with a nod and roar off down the avenue.At that time, choppers were more of an art form than anything else.
Builders used imagination and determination to fabricate machines that tested the limits of what technology allowed them. It is that lack of available technology that has me writing this now. Think about it: I am writing this on a portable computer so sophisticated that it could run most CAD/Cam programs, create a 3-D model of a bike, pick up my e-mail, and play my favorite CD all while plugged into the phone on the seat in front of me. Imagine what this laptop and a couple CAD/Cam programs could have done for the average chopper builder back when an eight-track was high-tech state-of-the-art sound.Over the last eight or nine years of talking to the men who built some of the first choppers to ever grace a magazine page, I know they would have loved this technology then. You get a group of those builders from 30-plus years ago together and ask them about the bikes they built back then. There is one common theme -- they have no idea how they rode them. They talk about flexible frames, brakes that couldn't stop a shopping cart, and riding positions that would have been impossible if not for youth being on their side. A dose of technology could have turned the original choppers into long-term bikes instead of bikes that went out of style within a year.The future is promising for this generation's crop of chopper innovators. With technology from aerospace and the computer industries spilling into the laps of today's builders, they have every advantage possible. Where the original chopper builders had to risk their lives to test a design, today's engineers can bring the part up on a modeling program and stress-test it six ways to Sunday before the first CNC machine ever fires up.
Look to tomorrow for the most reliable, coolest, and most innovative choppers to ever hit the streets. And the next time you walk into a chopper shop and see a few of the guys hunched over a computer screen, don't bet they're playing a video game -- odds are they're designing the next cool part for your bike. OK, my peanuts and Diet Coke are here -- back to video games. See you next issue.