The way most bikes are built begins with a customer and an idea. Said customer wanders into his local shop and discusses his intentions with the shop's proprietor, and a plan is set into motion.
Orange County Choppers is also known for its willingness to accommodate its customers by turning their wishes into reality. But every once in a while, Paul Teutul, owner of OCC, has enough time in between preplanned jobs to build a bike based on his own personal taste. Paul builds exactly what he likes as if he were building it for himself, which is, more often than not, exactly what he thinks he is doing. The problem is that people usually buy his personal bikes within minutes of viewing them. And with that said, you now know the story behind the motorcycle that you see on these pages.
OCC's staff was experiencing one of their rare slow periods and it was during this time that the wheels in Paul's mind started turning at a furious pace. He hadn't built himself something in almost four months and he was getting very antsy.
Paul dragged a Rolling Thunder frame from the back that just happened to have been ordered in his favorite dimensions - imagine that. With 45 degrees of rake, 5 inches of stretch in the backbone, and a whopping 10 inches of upward stretch at the front, the frame was a direct reflection of the properties Paul thought any good chopper foundation should possess. Of course, a 20-inch-over frontend built with RC Components pieces also fit nicely into Paul's personal scope of how things should be in a perfect world. After the frontend was fit with a 21-inch RC Components Regal wheel, RC brakes and Avon rubber, a matching setup - this time an 18-incher - was installed at the rear. He stood back and took a good, long look at what he created and muttered something like, "I might not know everything, but I do know what I like."
Another one of Paul's character traits is his affinity for panhead-style engines. So it was just natural that he had his main engine man, Steve McPhillips, assemble one with 88 inches of displacement based on a set of H-D cases with S&S wheels, rods, and pistons. Steve added a set of H-D cylinders and STD heads that were ported to provide some serious flow numbers. A Mallory ignition system was chosen to spark the mixture supplied by an S&S Super E carburetor, and the spent gases are expelled to the outside world with a custom-made exhaust system made in-house at Orange County Choppers. To pass the power along to the rear tire, OCC built a five-speed by shoehorning a JIMS gear cluster into a polished H-D case with Ness covers and linked it to the engine with a BDL open-belt primary drive.
When it comes to custom sheetmetal work, OCC can keep up with the best fabricators in the industry, which is apparent when viewing the pieces made for this bike. The nicely formed rear fender almost completely encompasses the rear wheel around its circumference and also covers a great deal of the sidewalls. Many of the bikes built by OCC do not run a front fender, but Paul had a vision for one that perfectly matched the rest of the metal used on the bike, so it was built. A fuel tank of such mammoth proportions that would probably look very out of place on other bikes works well with the aesthetics of this chopper. To make things extra-clean, the OCC oil tank and battery box were hidden underneath the transmission. Now that the sheetmetal was ready to go, it was loaded up along with the frame and driven to RSM Custom for a few coats of Tangelo pearl paint. In an effort to avoid making the bike too visually busy, OCC decided to forgo the graphics work to give the bike a simple, less-is-more look.
As soon as the color-sanding and buffing of the sheetmetal was complete, the chassis was filled with the drivetrain and all the bodywork was refit, and it was time for the final touches necessary to finish off the bike. OCC made a set of its own handlebars with built-in risers, added a Pat Kennedy headlight and fabricated a taillight of their own design. Hand and foot input is transferred to the machine via a set of controls from Midwest, and to make things easier, there were no turn signals, dashboard, or instrumentation of any kind used on the bike.
From start to finish, the project took only four weeks to complete and Paul actually has had the chance to take the bike for a few extended rides. We even got him to park it during Bike Week 2001 in Daytona Beach just long enough forus to get these photos taken. But this bike, just as many of its predecessors, has been chosen by a couple of OCC's customers as their next must-have custom, but Paul is resisting a sale for as long as possible. We don't know how long he will be able to hold out, but the good thing is, he'll be able to build another one, just as he has several times before. www.streetchopperweb.com