The path eventually led him to choppers, where he had help with his first, then sank a heap of cash into tools. He turned his apartment's garage into a full shop, and it was all good until his pesky neighbors bitched about the noise. He went back and forth with them until he'd had enough and rented a commercial place. The silver lining in that cloud was that he could work unfettered by whiners; Yaniv refitted with all kinds of fun new tools, and before he knew it Powerplant was a full-on business, complete with Uncle Sam at the door looking for a cut. His first expensive bike paid the way to the much bigger shop he runs now.
Since then, he's developed his own approach; Yaniv's signature move is reincarnating old motors into hand-built choppers sprinkled with generous doses of brass, aluminum, or copper. He built a jig last year, and although he'd like to mass produce his own skeleton, as things stand now all the frames are one-offs, and he's okay with that too. "We made a jig last year for our needs (we can do H-D or Triumphs)," he said. Powerplant does as much of their work by hand as it can, be it fenders, tanks, brackets, or pipes. "It's never the same pipe twice with us," Yaniv continued. "I use a lot of brass, copper, and aluminum. I don't work with steel too much, so there's not much powdercoating or chroming. It's mostly in-house polishing." That means tarnishing, but he doesn't mind; it makes his stuff look weathered. "We're not for the guy who wants to eat off his bike," he told us. "I do one bike at a time so I can give it the maximum attention, then ride the shit out of it to break in the motor." One of his favorite things to do is use all organic (curved) shapes. He loves to make the metal so you can't recognize the starting shape. At this point, he told us about a bike he'd made out of oval tubing just so folks would look at it and ask, "How the hell'd they do that?"
Frankie rolled up while we were talking, so it was back to business. It was already a sunny morning, but she made the day that much brighter. Billy and Toph tag-teamed shooting her for both the buyer's guide and Powerplant's Hollywood Cruiser while I went off and shot a couple of Yaniv's other creations in a back alley.
Normally, I'd never use an alley for a bike shoot-dumpsters and soiled hypodermic needles don't do it for me. In this case I made an exception. It could've been the smog clouding my judgment, but more likely it was the tons of cool graffiti on the back walls of all the shops. The real difficulty was finding a background I didn't want to use. But I digress.
Right about then Yaniv noticed Toph checking out a picture on the wall. That's when he uttered those famous words that've sent many a man to the emergency room. "Wanna see something cool?" Yaniv asked.
Yaniv rode up on an old YSR 50 a few times to make sure I hadn't destroyed the Panhead I was shooting, and an hour later I was back at the shop. Billy and Toph were taking care of business, so I cornered Yaniv and interrogated him regarding the Hollywood Cruiser you see now.
"Shane Markland's girlfriend bought the frame and motor on eBay. We modified the front, got it running for them. He rode it raw for a year before we found how we wanted to paint it," Yaniv said. Maybe it was the cheap spicy burrito, or the book he was reading at the time, but inspiration came to him where it finds many men. "It dawned on me in the shitter," he continued. "I was looking through this David Mann book. He did this painting of two riders going past a Hollyweed sign. We did it up like the gold one in the picture."