Where do bike builders get the ideas for their fantastic creations? It's not an easy feat to build the guaranteed head-turner, so Chris Sullivan of Sully's Old School Choppers decided to build a bike that he liked and the rest would follow suit. You've got to stick to your guns, right?
The inspiration for many of Sully's bikes ranges from day to day: A beer bottle cap, a certain color...but this particular bobber was conceptualized in Chris' bed one night. Yes, yes, we know that sounds a little off, but one night while Chris was lying in bed, bronze and brass trinkets ran through his head. After reflecting back to the days of working in a casket factory with his father where he often encountered odd pieces of bronze laying around the shop, he made up his mind to build a bike that would utilize brass and bronze throughout.
If you look closely, you'll notice that the bronze and brass do not overpower the other colors of the bike. It's subtle. A touch is all Chris needed to accentuate certain aspects of the bike. The brass contrasts the black and red tones, but doesn't unnecessarily interject the two colors; rather, it highlights them.
Chris imagined a bronze oil tank, gas tank, and rear fender. The rest of the brass plating just came naturally to mesh with the bronze. The bronze pieces are all hand-riveted and hand-fabricated. He called Custom Metal Finishers for the job. But Chris wasn't able to find many brass or bronze accessories for the bike, such as a gas cap. While visiting Lowe's Home Improvement store, he stumbled upon a brass sink stopper in the plumbing section. It was a pop-up cap that Chris decided would make the perfect gas cap. With little modification to the gas tank, it worked! Plus, he only had to shell out nine clams. On that same trip to Lowe's he found some brass wing nuts, and decided to use them for fasteners where he could. The gas tank wasn't completely finished yet, so he fabbed some fittings on the tank and went to the local hot rod shop and bought some red translucent gas line to complete the tank. For the stock Softail oil tank, Chris wanted something different, so he decided to wrap it in bronze and rivet it. He took a Chica rear fender and cut it short, and added a riveted bronze piece to match the gas tank and oil tank. Presto! The fender blended perfectly with the Sparto taillight, which was also done in brass. For the frontend, Chris used a short, mean looking Springer with a fat front tire. He's a big fan of the old hot rods and used the old classics as a template for the colored wheels, which are powdercoated in blood red to match the seat and pinstriping-also done in-house. The finishing touch to this bike was the exhaust. He stuck with the old hot rod theme and went with a genuine cherry bomb exhaust, and Chris proudly boasted, "It sounds great!"
Once the build was complete, Chris was one happy camper. "There is no better satisfaction than building a bike to your own vision and standards and getting a good response from other people on the style and workmanship. It just goes to show if you stick to your guns and build what you want to, you will make yourself happy and possibly some other people too," Chris said.
Sully's Old School Choppers has their manufacturer's license, so now you lucky devils can order some of the monster creations in their repertoire. Who knows, maybe you'll visualize your next build idea while lying in bed. If that's the case, just let Chris know. He can probably relate.