1. Here's our subject, a Shovelhead that lost a bunch of weight recently, but still has too broad of shoulders. While the 12-inch apes that are on it aren't garishly tall, I felt they don't fit the rest of the bike.
2. The shot from the rear really exaggerates the wideness of the old bars. Everything else on the bike is now fairly narrow and compact and the bars detract from it no matter how comfortable they were. This is a chopper after all, it has to look good!
3. Here we are getting the necessary measurements mentioned earlier. With me sitting on the bike, T-Bone measures the riser spacing, the rise of the bars, amount of pullback, the fall, and the overall width. You can use a magnetic angle finder from a hardware store to find out what your rake is, just put in on a straight section of a fork leg or tube.
4. Now T-Bone can start laying out his bends and cuts. These bars are going to be made out of heavy-wall stainless steel that can be polished afterward or left raw. Mild steel is your other option and you can paint, powdercoat, or chrome them.
5. A nice tubing bender like this JD-Squared unit is one thing that most guys don't have at home which is not to be confused with a simple pipe bender. T-Bone is putting the slight bends in the riser bars, which need to both be exactly the same.
6. I decided that 10-inches of rise was what I wanted, the risers will be cut here and then notched for the horizontal bar which is waiting above with marks for its bends.
7. The two little threaded bungs in the last picture get TIG welded into the bottoms of the riser tubes. This allows bolts from the underside of the top triple tree to mount the bars to the frontend. TIG welding is preferred for this kind of stuff because it looks great, has proper penetration, and leaves nothing to be ground down like big, messy, MIG welds.
8. See what I mean? Here is the proverbial "stack of dimes" TIG weld on the finished riser bung. This ain't no backyard coat hanger and car battery job here, take pride in your ride!