Gilby Clarke has carved out a pretty solid place in musical history as a genuine guitar hero. Rocking on stage in front of a few hundred thousand people with the members of Guns N' Roses may sound like an ideal job to a lot of us, but after a while it becomes just that-a job. Albeit it's a really cool job that many of us would kill to have, but after a while it becomes a job nonetheless. So what does a guy do when he is not rocking every ass in the free world or being a part of a successful TV show? If you are Gilby Clarke, you build, maintain, and ride the hell out of a fleet of Harley-Davidson-powered motorcycles. And we can tell you that Gilby is as passionate about his bikes as anyone we can think of. In fact, he rode this very bike on the El Diablo Run this year deep into the heart of Baja California.
But Gilby's relationship with this particular Panhead started way back in 1992, when he purchased the bike as a basket case. And back in '92 there weren't a lot of options when it came to aftermarket parts for early model bikes, so Troy Honeycutt and Jack Ferraris did the best they could with the bike and the limited resources they had at school in Phoenix that same year. That's when Gilby realized that the bike would always be a work in progress.
Flash forward to 2000: Time to update the bike. Gilby decided to take it to a local shop to have the crew freshen up the motor, put a fresh polish on the engine cases, and put an electric starter back on the bike. That's when all the trouble began. One day while he was out riding, the motor started pouring oil out of the lifter blocks-that was the day that the wheels started to come off the train. After fixing the oil leak, the bike would just quit running whenever Gilby would get it up to 70 miles per hour. Then it just broke down altogether.