Just under four years ago I made a claim that I would finish my 1976 Shovelhead chopper project over the winter. I put a few pieces together and then...
I didn't do anything.
A year or so later I made the same claim followed by a little video showing the assembly of the main components and again...
Nothing.
December 2025 came around and I sent a text to my buddy, Robbie, suggesting we finish our bikes and take them to Born-Free 17, which would take place the last weekend of June 2026. Six month to finish the bikes–a reasonable goal.
Robbie was in. His bike had a similar story to mine. It needed a top end in 2019 so we took it apart, rebuilt the motor, then left the parts to collect dust.
My tastes had changed a bit over the five or six years I let it sit so I decided to redo a few things. The fuel tank was chrome plated but it had rusted out so I got a new one and did a purple to silver powder coat fade. I swapped the 16 inch rear wheel for an 18 inch with a skinny Avon Safety Mileage tire so I needed a new slim fender and sissy bar. I went with polished stainless for both. The new spacers and rear caliper bracket I made with aluminum. The rear was ready to go.
One of the more time consuming pieces was the motor-mount foot pegs and brake/clutch lever combo. The foot-peg mount is 7/8" DOM tubing. I wanted it to be able to take my weight over pot holes. The pegs themselves are stainless with bronze powder coat. The levers are both polished stainless and despite the simple look, getting the brake lever to fit around the exhaust took a bit of effort.
Instagram views are important to keep you relevant (I wish that was fully sarcastic) so I needed an idea for an interesting jockey shifter. The eyeball on twisted stainless hex is what I came up with so feel free to check out that instagram reel showing how it was made.
There was a fair amount of small miscellaneous fab work to do to like the headlight mount, shaving the forks, making the aluminum front pulley cover, etc. that I plucked away at over the months between December and June as well as mechanical things like aligning the drivetrain, pluming the oil and brake lines, and setting up the front end. A trusty yellow sticky note held my to-do list and I made sure to cross something out every week. I kept putting off the last piece—the brass taillight—because I didn't know exactly what I wanted. The end result is pretty simple but i like it. Its machined down from 2 inch solid brass round stock, polished up, and filled with an LED running and brake light combo. Here's a short reel of how I made that.
A few weeks before the self-imposed Born-Free deadline the bike was nearly complete with the exception of wiring the lights. I figured I'd have ample opportunity to finish the wiring but ended up spending all my spare time over the next two weeks working on rebuilding the carb and trying to get the thing to run properly—turned out I had bad coil in the magneto that was causing a weak (and sometimes nonexistent) spark on one cylinder. I was able to do the heat cycles and 50 mile break in ride before loading it on a trailer for San Diego—our meet up point for the easy one-hour ride to Born Free.
Robbie and I left on a rainy evening and drove through wildfire smoke all the way to the southern edge of Utah where we spent the night. In the morning after a quick coffee run we spent an hour wiring the bike still strapped to the trailer. It went smoothly and finally I had lights.
After six hours of driving from southern Utah we met up with our friend Dane at his place in San Diego after a pitstop for the HWY video premier. In the morning we rode to Born Free through a bit of mist off the Pacific Ocean and a lot of splitting lanes. The show was hot but fun. The bikes were great but catching up with friends and making new ones was better. The mental scenes of laughing in a random Mediterranean restaurant with a group of people I rarely get see, a dusk skate session at an Orange County skatepark while watching a storm roll in from the west, and the hour riding home in the rainy dark—glad to have my lights working—are the memories that really stick.
