The Pink Taco
Duane Ballard also had a great name dreamt up for his tribute to the past cover bikes of Street Chopper and decided to run with it full-force.
Duane is a die-hard Honda maniac, so the Pink Taco never even had the choice of an H-D motor between the rails. Freddie Hernandez was also called upon to build Duane's frame, which has a similar stretch and length to Kutty's. The major difference is the downtube design that makes way for all of that exhaust plumbing of the `75 CB750 motor. Dennis Trudelle was responsible for bringing this engine back from the dead. He and Duane decided to keep it mostly stock for reliability reasons, but Dennis did do a bit of porting and polishing before getting the motor back together. Duane hand-made the pipes with help from a Biltwell pipe kit and topped them off a ton of chrome.
The Pink Taco rills on an interesting mix of wheels with the rear being a chromed-out 16-inch wheel off of a `07 Harley-Davison bagger and the front being a NOS 19-inch Hallcraft Satellite wheel. The bike stops both wheels with aid of Hawg Halters calipers mated to Raygun Technologies rotors.
Up front the bike rides on a 12-over Hernandez Springer with a West Eagle headlight guiding the way. In the control department Duane had Black Sunshine Customs build him a set of handlebars, which he topped off with a set of Switchblade Billet hand controls, a set of Kutty's Hippy Killer grips and a Wire Plus gauge.
Once the Pink Taco was mocked-up and holding fluids, Duane shuffled the bike over to Road Dog Customs where Sonny Boy worked his magic. The paint is an insane mix of House of Kolor pink and purple candy laid over loads of mini flake. The paint is so translucent that it looks as if the graphics are floating above the basecoat.
When Duane go the painted parts back from Sonny, he and a few friends had a mad thrash to get the bike done to get it in this very issue and made it just in time.
Though no man clearly came out on top of this rivalry due to both bikes being of top-notch construction, we are all winners for getting to see what they came up with. These two friends walked the line of past and present as well as anyone could. And did so with two well-built flashback machines that will be turning heads well into the future. Bravo gents!