I’ve known John Edwards for close to two decades now. From what I’ve seen over that time John has always been the kind of guy with an eye for what looks right and a talented car, truck, and bike builder. He’s also one funny dude with a great sense of humor, so when he told me he was going to paint his next Panhead pink, I thought he was shitting me. Well, a few months later while we are sitting at a local bar in his hometown of Garden Grove, California, he shows me a picture of his sheetmetal fresh out of his Olde Tyme Custom Paint booth and damn if it wasn’t the sweetest shade of pink I have ever seen laid on two wheels.

Out in Lakewood, Ohio, is a little place by the name of The Gas Box. Since 2009, Jesse Bassett, proprietor of The Gas Box, has specialized in custom fabrication and vintage motorcycles of all makes and models. Having built some nice British bikes, Jesse wanted to build a Harley-Davidson Big Twin, and when a customer by the name of Greg Christian came knocking, a Shovelhead build was next on the list.

Leisure suits. The Bee Gees. Pintos, Gremlins, and Pacers. Yeah, in a lot of ways, the ’70s sucked. Hard. But the ’70s also gave us some serious coolness, especially in the motorcycle department. So, four years ago when Scot Schneider set out to build his latest creation, he had one thing in mind—a loving tribute to the beautiful scoots from what many consider the Golden Age of the Chopper: the 1970s.

Sometimes bike projects go as smooth as butter. Every piece fits like a Lego and the paint doesn’t even run! However, sometimes when builds don’t go smooth and easy, they end up better for it in the end. Such is the case with Rob Watt’s ’53 Panhead chopper. Rob bought the original bike in 2006 from his buddy, Carl Gorman, a mechanic at the local H-D dealership in Victoria, British Columbia. When he got it, it was a runner, although a bit of a mishmash of parts. Carl was fairly sure that the engine was stroked, although it ran strong so he never had a reason to pull it apart. It had a beautiful set of stainless side pipes, repop twin-bob tanks, 16-inch wheels front and back, and a horrible overstuffed two-up seat. Almost right away Rob put it through a cosmetic rebuild, bobbing the fender, replacing the twin-bobs with a small sportster tank, and replacing the wide mini-apes with a set of Z-bars. The bike looked good and ran strong. However, after only six months of ownership, on a run up to the Pig’n’Fin bike meet on Vancouver Island, Rob blew the engine. Rob was able to shut it down before it completely drained of oil. Unfortunately, that was the end of the trip for the bike. It went into the chase truck, and Rob figured he would deal with the repair at some point after the weekend.

The “Jerry’s Kid” Shovel you see here started with a call from a guy wanting a radical bike built on a not-so-radical budget. Months before, he had been majorly soaked by some other shop to the tune of way-too-much cash on one of those silly fat-tire, way-too-much-stretch, catalog-style jams and had recently unloaded that made-for-TV piece of shit.

Earlier this year I vacated my former place of residence and was for the first time in three decades completely garage-less. It didn’t bother me at first because I have access to our company’s tech center for working on bikes. Believe me when I say that it is outfitted with just about anything needed to fabricate a chopper from the ground up, but it has more of a clean-room feel and less of a place in which to get down and dirty. Don’t get me wrong, having a white-walled wonderland in which to wrench is a very good thing and it allows me to get much work done.

Some bikes just stick in your head like a lawn dart the first time you see them. There is a crazy Knucklehead chopper from Los Angeles that has had this effect on most anyone that lays eyes on it. Seeing a picture of it is wild, but laying your eyes on it in person is an experience that uses most of your senses—all except touch! You better not put yer greasy, sweaty mitts on this bike, but you can be assured it is smooth as the preverbal baby’s keester. You either love or hate the over-the-top paint, but regardless you can almost taste it, which might be like licking the center of a Gobstopper. The tall chrome upsweeps look like they sound loud even when the bike is sitting still and you get a whiff of the old exhaust smell only a 70-plus-year-old glorified tractor motor can churn out. Touch might be worked in after all because you sure feel different after giving this bike the ol’ once over, twice.

It all started August of 2010 when my good friend, Rodney, told me I needed to build a bike for the Grand National Roadster Show. I thought building a bike and showing California what Colorado had to offer sounded like a great idea. What to build was easy, I’d been building a dual-carb VL knuckle in my head for a while, and now I finally had an excuse to build it. The very next week I started to collect all the parts I would need for the build. I also took the motor I already had in my possession down to Deluxe Motor Company for them to go through along with the Little John five-speed tranny I got from my good friend, Pete Slaktowitz. It just so happened that Little John was also a Denver guy that made the first aftermarket five-speed transmission for Harleys back in the ’70s. Now that the motor was safe and sound, I went searching for the frame. I looked all over Colorado for a good VL frame and didn’t find anything, probably because I needed one. I had to resort to the dreaded eBay where I got a frame that was listed as perfect. Well, guess what? It was not so much perfect as it was a pile of shit. The back half looked like it had been buried for 50 years and the neck was bent. It was too late to find a better one because the clock was ticking. I straightened the frame, and cut off the axle plates and badly rusted parts. I then cut the tranny plate loose and bent it down so it was parallel with the ground, like it should be. After that was done, I modified the frame to adapt the new Panhead axle plates.

Back in Match of ’74 Sonny Newal of Vista, California hardtailed this ’49 Panhead then narrowed and lengthened a stock springer a total of 4-inches. For the sheet metal, Sonny “flat bottomed” a Sportster, chopped up a 5-inch FLHT tank and a dude by the name of Lee Moye lacquer painted this sweet machine candy pearl orange. I sure he and his ’ol lady as well as his brothers in the Rouges MC dug cruising the California coast back in the day. STC

This build started out as a simple purchase of a throwback ’65 from a guy out in Colorado while I was living in SoCal. I fully intended to ride the piss out of it for a while, then flip it. Unfortunately, somewhere between dribble and full-stream, the crank pin decided that it had run out of gusto. After 4 miles of pushing it home and cursing loudly at anyone who’d listen, I decided to keep her and exercise the bike’s ghosts for good. The motor went to Rico at Hi-Bond Modified to get it back to stock and trustworthy, while I started in on the rest.

It’s hard to figure out who to go to these days. I’m sure you’ve walked into shops that look like several customers’ dusty projects have been on a bike lift for years without any progress. And there’s a chopper shop or three in nearly every major U.S. city with the current explosion of garage-built styled bikes.

So you want to know how this bike came about, huh? Well, it happened after a tarot card reader gave a few of us Haints a tip on a mystical steed being held prisoner from choppers past. Now knowing our destiny, our brother Duane unleashed his stash of cash and we set out on a quest to far away lands deep in the heart of Alabama.

For motorcycle freaks like us, what’s a more touching, more quintessentially American story than a heartwarming tale about a boy and his dog? One about a boy and his motorbike, of course. And while we all consider our bikes our best friends, when it comes to some riders, it’s as if their bike picked them more than they picked it.

The most important thing you should know about Kirk Jones (KIRK!) is that he is angered, disgusted, and bored by the “norm.” KIRK! has been responsible for many unique internal-combustion-driven projects over the past 15 or so years, all going against the grain and striving to subliminally give the finger to the expected, while retaining design integrity, creativity, and yes, maybe even class. With project names like “My Little Pony” and “May Cause Dangerous,” the cryptic name of his latest endeavor, “Mother F-ing Space Olympics,” comes as no surprise. I caught up with KIRK! at his desert compound to find out about his recently finished bike.

We built another café-styled bike a while back on a rigid frame. I caught a lot a flack from the Internet Bike Builders of America (IBBA), aka the motorcycle label police, for calling it a café bike. This time around I wanted to build something the IBBA mechanically dubbed a real “café racer,” but do it super ’70s and hopefully piss those guys off again, so we banged out this cafeteria racer just in time for Sturgis’ 70th anniversary, where the Street Chopper staff noticed it in a sea of V-twins.

I have known Dave Polegreen for a few years and it amazes me that the guy churns out so many bitchen bikes on a regular basis. It’s like there are three of him banging away on old Harleys in his basement. Dave has already had bikes featured in Street Chopper, and I am sure he will have a few more in future issues.

It doesn’t matter if you have been building bikes for years or have just torn into your first Craigslist score, it’s good to see the focus is on keeping old iron alive. I, like you, have been interested in old bikes and cars for many reasons, but the main one is these hunks of metal have a strong linage and a gearhead pedigree of sorts.

I met Walt through a series of friends and all I can say is the guy has a magnetic sense of charm, would lend you his last roll of duct tape and bailing wire, and is one witty and sardonic somebitch. He looks more like a real-life version of one of the Hair Bear Bunch than a down-and-dirty cross-country riding biker, but the man has a bad case of white-line fever and has racked up more miles on two-wheels than most ever will on four.

Being around old bikes in Southern California, it’s not a surprise if you’ve run into “Can’t Stay” Jose before. He might’ve pulled over and helped you out when you were broken down somewhere. Maybe he offered to give you and your bike a lift or even hooked you up with his spare ignition coil. There’s also a chance that he rubbed you the wrong way for selling overpriced chopper parts at the local swap meet. You never know just which personality of Jose you’re going to get the first go around, that’s for sure.

Few motorcycles I ever see really evoke emotion. You might see a killer chopper and it might give you the inspiration to get yourself in the wind, rollin’ down a long highway without a care in the world. You might see a race bike that makes you want to take on the world in the twisties or the straightaway. Maybe it’s because I spent a good few years of my life working on beat-up shovelheads that it takes a hell of a shovelhead to throw me for a loop. Well this is that bike.

Have you ever tried to explain to someone who doesn’t ride, just why you are in love with motorcycles?

Sometimes language gets in the way of simply enjoying someone’s creation. As much as you’d like to talk to them about what they’ve done and why, sometimes it just isn’t possible. Luckily the currency of a picture is still worth a thousand words, no matter how poor the dollar might be.

Steven Wright likes old choppers. He also collects old chopper parts; he’s an aficionado of sorts. He had a certain theme in mind for this build: a tall, slender chopper with a king and queen seat that would be comfortable on long rides. After browsing numerous old biker magazines and chopper photos for inspiration, he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted. Also, luck played a small part in the outcome of this old, molded Ironhead.

Tom’s Titan was his first ditch effort into the chopper-building world. He and his ol’ lady used this ’53 Panhead to roll around the Jersey Shore back in the day. Being from Trenton, New Jersey, he sold Triumphs and Hondas to pay the bills, and a Harley platform was quite the departure to use for his first chopper project. However, it graced the pages of Street Chopper in the early ’70s as a result.