What would you do with an old, rusty bike? Most would just let it sit out in the backyard covered with a tarp and rot away, but some guys get excited and inspired when they see what most people consider junk.
It's a growing trend, yet it's always been there-all bike builders find inspiration from the past. And those bikes quietly rusting away out in backyards and in forgotten corners of cluttered garages are blueprints for the amazing nostalgia-inspired customs we can't get enough of today. A little piece of the past is exactly what went into this chopper from Steel City Choppers.
The owner, Steve Peffer, can often be found with tools in hand, working on some cool bikes. Most of his builds get their inspiration from the early '50s and '60s and a healthy dose of hot-rod legend Big Daddy Ed Roth. Someone a little closer to the motorcycle world who provided additional inspiration for Steve was the late Indian Larry and the distinctive twisted metalwork seen in his downtubes and framework. Steve comes from a background of hard-core chopper builds all the way back to his early days in Pennsylvania. He was looking for his next build when he came across this knucklehead motor sitting in a corner of his shop. The thick coat of dust reminded Steve just how long the motor had been there. The customer had stopped paying, so Steve had stopped building. You know what they say-out of sight, out of mind. The stagnant '46 knuckle was the perfect motor to build a tribute bike to his heroes.
Steve ran the motor over to Tony at Knucklehead Power in Daytona, Florida, where a new set of heads and cylinders was fitted with pistons and rings. As far as the carb for the bike was concerned, Steve got an old S&S B carb. He liked that the carb was modeled after the old Linkert and would work well with the motor. A custom manifold needed to be made, so Steve headed out to the plumbing supply store to get all the copper fittings needed to weld a long manifold together. Tony told Steve, "Bolt this motor to the frame and hold on." OK, we know what you're probably thinking-it's an old knuckle-but still Tony knew it would be a kick-ass ride once it was finished. The motor was matched up with a RevTech five-speed trans with a kicker and a Tech Cycle primary drive.
Steve headed back to the shop to figure out the frame. A new fresh-from-the-jig Santee frame was placed on the shop floor, and both Steve and Cappy, a trusty shop hand, beat the crap out of the frame with ball-peen hammers. The two were trying to cover the frame with as many dings as they could; the frame was getting copper-plated after mockup. Steve had seen an old set of hand-pounded copper pots from good ol' Mexico and liked the look so much that the frame got the same treatment. The front downtube was then cut out, and a piece of hexagon stock was heated, twisted, and welded back on to the frame as the new downtube.
Keeping with the "what can we beat on?" theme, Steve first pulled out a Paughco springer with straight legs, but it didn't match the look. In the spirit of Indian Larry, they pulled it apart and gave it a twist. After the front legs were heated and twisted, Steve made a jig that would let him bend the legs into the same wishbone shape as the lower frametubes. Still in a twisting frame of mind, Steve pulled out some hexagon steel stock and made a matching sissy bar to hold the rear fender in place and keep the ladies from flying off the back. After looking for a set of handlebars that would work on this build and not finding anything, Steve pulled out the torches and some more hexagon and started twisting up a set of 18-inch apes.
Next came the sheetmetal. A WCC rear fender was cut to fit the frame and give a small place for the ladies, and then a WCC gas tank was cut all to hell. When Steve picked up the frame from the plate shop, the guy showed him a '30s Pontiac fender accent that was never picked up and thought it would make a good spine for the gas tank. As for the oil bag, it came from CCI, but Steve couldn't leave it alone, so it too was worked over. The paint was all done in-house; Steve covered all the sheetmetal in a black basecoat, then a coat of black, and topped it off with some more gloss black. He was trying to get that blacked-out look from the rest of the bike to help highlight all the copper. When it came time to put the bike back together, it was a breeze. Around that time Steve and Carl Capareli made a set of custom forward controls for the bike with a set of torches and some stainless steel.
As things moved along, the bike came together in about three months, counting from the time Steve rediscovered his motor until the time he headed out to the next big bike show in Charlotte, North Carolina. The one thing that this bike did for Steve and all the guys at the shop was to set the bar for the next bike build. After all, they can't just build a simple bike from here on out. As Steve always says, "Keep your knees in the breeze!"