Bonneville Bob-Job

BONNEVILLE BOB-JOB

American FLYERS

Louisiana to Utah the hard way

WHY IS THIS MAN SMILing? Wouldn't you be all dimply-cheeked if you’d just ridden your hardtail Harley 1600 miles from Shreveport, Louisiana, to Wendover, Utah, stripped off the street equipment, then churned across the Bonneville Salt Flats at 87.67 mph with nothing between your ass and the frame rails but a set of leathers?

Nor us. But then, we don’t look good in biker boots, plaid shorts, BSA shirt or blue hair, either.

That would be one JT Nesbitt in the photograph, snapped last summer alongside his bobbed 1941 ULH sidevalver. Actually, the

engine cases may have left Milwaukee in ’4L but like all good bob-jobbers, Nesbitt was not hemmed-in by originality in his build-up. S&S flywheels took up residence inside the cases. Cams are Andrews, valves from Rowe, pinion and primary-drive shafts from Jims. Flathead Power, a Swedish outfit, provided the hi-po cylinders and heads. Fuel-mixing is capably handled by a 36mm Dell’Orto pumper. Shotgun exhaust is a “muffler-shop special.” Primary is an open belt from Rivera-leave your bellbottoms at home, please. Frame is a newly built Paughco, with seatpost tube added. “The sprung saddle makes the thing bearable on the street,” claims

Nesbitt. Right...

Our man JT chose wisely when it came to brakes and front suspension. That’s a Works Performance shock installed on the shortened P&P girder fork. And take a Grimeca four-shoe front brake borrowed from some poor, unsuspecting Moto Guzzi, add a PM disc out back-you’ve got, oh, roughly 27 times the stopping power of a stock UL.

“The appeal of a bobber is in its honesty, far removed from the garish and decorative ‘custom’ Harleys of our time,” says Nesbitt of his self-described Frankenstein Flathead. “The underlying truth to the bobber is its functionality and quest for

performance, transcending style and fashion.”

Immediately after his landspeed run, Nesbitt reinstalled the tractor-pan seat and lights, bungeed his beat-up suitcase to the back, then nosed the black, barely legal Harley home toward the Creole State. How’d it go?

“Exactly what you’d expect from a cross-country trip on an old Flathead,” he says. “Got stopped by the cops a lot and had more roadside misery than you can shake a monkey at.”

And still the man smiles.

Of course, at the time the photo was taken, he still had to get bike and body back to Shreveport...

David Edwards