is done

clinton james

I wanted to put this up. Anne took this a couple weeks ago at Lou's house. Here's CJ's pan-shovel all done. Those are the tins i posted at the begining of the summer, in action.

parts delivery

I'll let the pics speak for themselves. Finally got the gas tanks back. I jumped right in and mounted them on the bike. Now the wooden bike is really falling in place.

dude knows how to handle a Harley

" I love the feeling of the fresh air on my face and the wind blowing through my hair."

Evel Knievel

traded my chevy

So i wanted a change of pace. And i traded my 50 Chevy for this 51 Ford. It's got a flathead v8.

wood bike...

still waitin to get the tanks back from the wood grainer. we put the bike off the table just fucking around. this was the first time any of us had seen it on the ground and outside the shop since probably last september.

it's gettin closer.

Sometimes they come back...

This bike was the first one i ever built.

Nick and i finished it almost exactly 3 years ago. We had built it for a friend of ours who just never got around to riding it. Evidently it has spent the last 2 1/2 yrs quietly rusting away

under a tarp somewhere. It's gotten pretty rough being carelessly neglected for so long. But scotch-brite and chrome polish should straighten it out.

Very recently fellow Butcher Shopper Kyle picked it up for a good price and had me swap out the crappy ass harley electronic ignition for a set of good old fashioned points. Next order of business will be to clean the varnish out of the tank and carb, charge the battery up good, then fire it up. This is Kyle's first harley.

It's just funny to have built something a while ago, then get to work on it again. Not to mention it's like a time capsule to see how far i've gotten/fallen behind or whatever.

My favorite part of this bike has always been the pipes nick spent like 3 days making. There's prob twenty pieces of pipe joined together to make them.

The stance of the bike is cool, in my opinion, looks like a chopper, stretched rake, over tubes in the front end.

Some people don't like the look of it. But i have a soft spot for it since it was afterall the first bike I helped build at the Butcher Shop.

Anne took some pics...

So...

Bryans girlfriend Anne took these shots. i though i'd post them up here. She is also on her way to becoming the paint slinger for the shop. A few posts back there was a shot of a blue tank with yellow lace she painted.
These pictures, I liked them, and i think they're pretty good for a girl. But im sure if i was using some Eos Rebel SLR camera i'd have bomb lookin pics too.

(best shot)

my apprentice James




the passionate bad boy

i'm going solo

after a lot of thought i've decided to leave the Butcher Shop, no there was no big blow out between me and any of the guys at the garage, but i did have a couple reasons. first the garage has not been the garage since we lost the big shop that everybody chipped in on. as much as i bitched about it being a zoo and impossible to work in , i loved it and now i miss it. the second is that i've just been bummed on motorcycles lately and need a fresh start.
the fact is that i've been doing my own thing out of my garage at home for awhile, and now it's just official. i havn't decided if i'm going to name the shop and all that, but i do want to take buying vintage parts a little more serious. i plan on hitting a swap with Ed this weekend and i hope it gives me the kick in the ass i need to start buying up parts and get excited about this shit again.

SPOILER ALERT...the wood bike

Really I wanted to wait until the end, but I couldn't help it. This is our latest build. We started it so long ago now. We had to wait about 6 months to get the frame back from the wood grainers. But it's back and Nick and I have been going full steam ahead on it for the past few days. When it's all over, i'll be posting tons of pics and the whole build story. but for now...

Here's what we got to start with.

This is actually the old frame from my bike. I used a spare to build mine, and since this bike had an ugly late model ironhead frame, we welded a hard tail to my old one and used it here.

This was right towards the end of the mock up.

Here's Dennis powdering the bits up. Doo-Doo Brown matches good with the tone of the bike.

Here's what she looks like the other day. Waiting for the tanks to come back, Nick and I are now tying up loose ends.

The Dirty Girl...Bryan's 79 Sportster

Bryan had been asking me to post some pics for a while. I thought today was as good a day as any. He just got the bike running again this afternoon. More on that in a minute. To understand this bike, it's important to realize where it came from.

Lou and CJ bought it as a basket case years ago. They put it together in Lou's fathers shed. The fram is actually for an EVO sportster, and it seems it's a special made to order Paughco rigid. To say it's low is an understatement. For some reason it was made with the drop-outs super high up from the bottom of the frame. That seems to be how it gets down so low.

After crafting some ingenious motor mounts, the Ironhead motor fit in with room to spare. Turns out the motor itself is special, it has an S&S stroker kit in it with 1200 flywheels and EXPENSIVE ass special stroker pistons.

After Lou rode it a couple years, it eventually fell into our friend Josh's hands.

Here's what she looked like when Josh owned it.

Obviously since buying it Bryan made some changes. He brought it to the Smoke Out a few years ago looking like that. Afterwards though, he tore it down, repainted the frame, changed the tires, added a rear wheel powdercoated black with stainless spokes. After that he found the tin set in this guys basement, untouched since about the 70's when it looks like it was painted. Nick cut the stock sportster part of the rear fender off to re-radius it to fit the frame better and Bryan and I made the pipes. Our resident painter Sean Foley did the oil tank and aircleaner artwork.

These pics are actually from last summer. If you go back in our archives here you can find the photos i took of the handle bars Nick and Bryan made from stainless stell, like all our home made bars are constructed from.

The bike, due to its large displacement, has ALWAYS been a pain in the ass to start. It eats batteries and starters for breakfast. So the other day, Bryan and I swapped out the starter from Nick's Brown Bike and got her running again.

Lately Bryan has rebuilt the top end with those EXPENSIVE ASS stroker pistons from S&S, he installed a Super-B carb and DYna 2000i ignition to give some more ooomph to that ironhead. And today he got it running.

Thats about it. Again, if you look back in the archives you can find the post about his conterfeit liscense plate. You can also watch Bryan talk about it in the Choppahead DVD Vol.3

some twisted shit

So i was riding thhrough a parking lot at the beach with Dennis. As i was turning, leaned over pretty far, the side of my back tire found a patch of sand. Next thing i know im picking myself up off the ground. I low sided it and the bike spun a 180. After my knee tried digging a hole in the asphalt i evidently somersaulted over the wreck.

Worst part was this was at a VW car show and there were like 100 people watching the whole thing. i felt like such a fool. I wish i could've crawled into my helmet. But i picked up that bike like a lunchbox and rode out as fast as i could.

This is not a trick shot. Thats how bent my grape hangers are. I'll get em' straight though.

Heres my fucked up knee. Super concentrated road rash and very swollen. But other than a new gangsta limp and a bruised ego, no bodily harm.



This fucking shiter was so hard to move what with being stuffed into the primary and all.

But now moving along this is whats next on the list. The rear rockerbox on my ironhead is leaking bad. Thing is, a couple of the bolts are under the frame backbone. And so the whole cylinder head is coming off. Then i can get the rocker box off.

Bryan really hooked me up finding the ONLY one at the entire Stafford Springs swaps the last time we went.

So all in all i had a great time last weekend. The weather has finally broken around here and Bryan is getting closer to finishing the Dirty Girl. Pete has a WAY to go on his scoot, and Dennis' evo-knievo has some reassembling he has to do, so hopefully everybody will be up and running soon enough. After all, the point of doing all this shit is to ride them.

picked up a new tank this weekend

scored it for 75 beans 5 mins into the first row.

Ground Floor

I posted a pic of the Chevy over the weekend. That's the "before" picture. Today i went and had u-bolts made, then bought the rectangle tube. It's three inches tall and the right width for the spring. I had to drill holes in it and put an allen head bolt for the little peg that centers it on the axle. Easy breezy.

There you go. 3 Inches lower and i'm a lot happier.

yesterday

My 1950 Chevy

i been out riding

CJ took his bike apart to paint the frame (the ironhead is for the wooden bike)