"Dude, there's this really cool guy in northern California who kicked ass in all the shows back in the day. We want you to do a story on him for the 40th," Jeff Holt told me over the phone. "No, shit, Jeff. His name was Arlen Ness and you've already got me doing it," I reminded him.Seconds later Jeff shut my smartass mouth up by telling me "Not just him. There was this guy named Bob Cecchini who even beat Arlen back then." See, I'd forgot that not all of the great classical-era builders turned pro. Bob Cecchini falls into that category. His finished iron has stood in shows with the best of 'em and won. And Street Chopper was there to prove it. We ran more than one of his creations on these here pages; it was with sheer delight that we found out he was still up in NorCal and had American Express-one of his champion steeds-still in the stable. Bob was only too happy to accomodate us.
It turns out that Bob and Arlen Ness were good friends back in the '60s and '70s. Both were big into hot rod cars. "It was the '50s and rodding is what everybody did. You could afford a $50-$100 car to hop up, so anyone who could turn a wrench half-way decent had a hot rod. Us car guys grew up with a shared knowledge," Bob recalled. Like Arlen, he got into the bike scene later (he was 30). "I rode a buddy's Sportster and liked it, so I bought one. Then I took it to Arlen's garage and worked on it." Back then, if you wanted to call yourself a gearhead in California, attending the Grand National Roadster was practically mandatory. One year, Bob went with his bike buddies. One of whom wasn't too big on the stock foreign bikes sitting in a little group. "Look at those Hondas. Don't they look like shit?" Right then Bob made it his mission to prove his buddy wrong. "Those Hondas were just a different flavor so I resolved to win the show with one.
That takes some will, right there. There wasn't even a motorcycle category at that time; the two wheelers ran head-to-head against the best and brightest hot rod cars on the West Coast. Not only did Bob have to beat the other choppers, he had to beat everybody. And he did. In the year between shows, he took a stock 750cc Honda motor and turned it into a real show stopper named American Express, and you're looking at it right now.
He took a really unique approach to building it, too. There was an artist who went by "The Giant" in the San Francisco Bay at that time. He'd drawn a design that appealed to Cecchini. "Figuring out how to do it was the hardest part. I did a full-scale drawing of that design on my garage floor," Bob said. "We put the engine on blocks and I drew the rest of the bike at full size around it. Then we traced the rest of it onto butcher paper for blueprints. Other guys followed that idea later."