The windfall of orders presented another problem: building the parts to fulfill the orders. Earlier on Tex worked a deal for the L.A. Roadsters guys to attend Lincoln Electric welding seminars, but there remained this issue of Tom's mobility-or lack of it. "Tom was in the wheelchair so we had a piece of asbestos cloth that we put across his lap," Jim said. Tex added, "Jim would cut the things out and hold them in place while Tom welded them while sitting in his wheelchair using the buzz box."
"We needed a way to deposit the money in the bank (but) there was no real plan to start a chopper company," Jim said. Even though it was officially closed down, Auto Electric Engineering still existed as a bank account. "So that was where we put the money." So if you've ever wondered where the name AEE Choppers came from...
>Stretching Bucks
>Raking in the dough.
AEE Choppers gave Tom and Rose a commercial building in Buena Park, California, but little more to fund anything else. Then one day Dave Brackett walked in to AEE Choppers' Whitaker street location.
"Tom and I had been friends since about 1962," he began. "We'd shared a house and went hot-rodding together. So when I got out of the service in 1968 I went around looking up old friends. I walked in the front door and once he recognized me he looked me straight in the eye and said, 'You're coming to work with me."
"Tom was a good salesman but he wasn't necessarily a good fabricator," he continued. "The whole operation was, to be fair about it, Mickey Mouse. He wanted me to come in and help out."
His first order of business: set up the shop for production. "They made a lot of sissybars," he said. "They were heating them with torches and making them one at a time which was just absurd." Banking on his industrial technology education, he made some jigs, found a stamping company, and hired another welder. "It tripled or quadrupled production."
AEE Choppers development skyrocketed. "I remember Tom came to me and he had a Sportster hardtail section that was made by Harley. He held it up and asked 'can you make something like this? We could sell these if we had them.'" He made another jig; the hardtails sold.
"Then we decided 'Hey, we've started a chopper here; why don't we continue to put some more AEE products on it and put it in the AEE catalogs to show new stuff we're doing. That was the first bike that I'm aware of that used AEE manufactured products to create sales. This was in early 1969."
Things still didn't pencil out. "[Tom] was complaining that business up top seemed to be successful but that there wasn't much capital available for creating new products and building inventory," Dave observed. "Often times they were using money for future orders to pay back bills." The reason? Advertising. "That was necessary but hitting the bottom-line of the business," he admitted.
"Ed Roth came out with a little thing he called Chopper Magazine," Tex noted. "So, Tom decided he'd like to do something along those lines to sell his products. We figured if we had our own magazine our advertising would be free, people would pay us to advertise, and we could of course slide all the stories to AEE products and feature the bikes so it would be a win-win deal," Dave added.
"I set Tom and Rose-Wild Rose-down at my kitchen table," Tex said. "I showed them how to design or paste-up and put everything together. I told 'em, 'Just change the name to Street Chopper.' So that's what they did."
"For a year, Rose would get all the materials together and they'd come to see me or I'd go to see them and I'd tell them what to do. Rose would then follow through and get it printed and ship it out."