What do you do when you want to build a bike, and all you've seen in your neighborhood as you were growing up were bikes like this one? You build one just like them. As a youngster, Jess (aka "Chopper") grew up on the streets of Los Angeles, where he often saw choppers (real choppers) cruising the streets with long raked-out frontends, tall sissy bars, and big loud motors. But back then it was all about the hardcore rides-taking what you had and making something badass with it. So when the time came for Jess to build a bike, he knew that it had to be just like the bikes he saw growing up.
At the time, the market wasn't full of custom builders; you had to take something stock and make it the way you wanted it. So when Jess heard that one of his friends had started a build from a basket case and wanted out, he jumped on it. The price was right, the timing was right, but the help was not. He picked up the basket case-and we all know the story behind every one of them: "It was a running bike when we took it apart for paint." But as with most basket cases, this was not a complete bike-at least, not everything he got was actually for this bike. So Jess laid out everything he had on the garage floor and called a friend, better known as "Tramp," to come over and give him a hand. The two came to the conclusion that it was a mix of panhead and knucklehead parts. It was still a good starting point, and Jess went on the hunt to find all the missing parts to build one of these bikes. Everything shifted when Jess took the frame to get it sandblasted. It was actually in great shape, so he removed any tabs and mounts that weren't needed. With the frame sitting in his garage naked, he was fired up to get the powerplant together.
As luck would have it, one day as Jess was on his way home from work he stopped at Laidlaw's Harley-Davidson in Rosemead, California, to get a few parts for the frame and wheels. Then he heard Bob Laidlaw say that he had an old panhead motor he was looking to sell. Jess asked how much, and the next thing he knew there was a '57 panhead motor sitting in the back of his truck.