Art of the Chopper

Art of the Chopper

UP FRONT

David Edwards

HEY, WHO NEEDS ONLINE AUCTIONS, Walneck's or the Sunday classifieds when you have friends like Allan Girdler?

“I know you just bought a chopper,” he began, referring to my period-authentic BSA 650 (“eBay Beezer,” June, 2003), “and why anybody would want two of the god-awful things is beyond me, but you might want to have a look at this one.”

Allan had taken his 200,000-mile pickup to the radiator shop for repairs, and was unloading his Harley XR street-tracker for the ride home when the shop owner, sensing a man with out-of-the-ordinary tastes, mentioned he had a “show-quality”

BSA chopper for sale.

No great fan of the genre, AG immediately phoned a more suitable mark.

What greeted me in a neat stucco suburban neighborhood was maybe the last remnants of Mark DeLeon’s wild youth, parked under a tarp as it had been for most of the last two decades. It had started life as a 1966 Lightning, the sporty twin-carb 650, but not much of the BSA factory’s handiwork remained. Typical of 1970s choppers, its frame had been raked and molded, then treated to a fogged, silver-to-candy-blue paint job. Sitting atop the frame was a flamed, Frisco-style Sportster gas tank. Extended fork tubes, of course, and chromed struts in place of the shocks making a poor man’s hardtail. Other authentic, ofthe-era touches: the fat, 16-inch Harley rear wheel and Goodyear tire barely squeezed under a ribbed Wassell fender; a cobra-style seat in the very finest of Naugha; chrome-plated oil tank, swingarm and rear hub; and CV Keihin carbs from a Honda 450 rather than the evil Amals.

But there was a reason it hadn’t been ridden in 20-odd years. An engine rebuild went for naught when the oil lines were wrongly hooked up, relegating the locked-up Beezer to the back of the garage. Other indignities followed-an exhaust pipe went missing, the neighbor’s labrador took a liking to the seat, a buddy needed this part or that. Onceshiny chrome went cloudy, then rusty.

Yet beneath the scruff was an undeniable style. It is doubtful the BSA was ever really a show-winner, but DeLeon’s craftsmanship was far above the average home chopper builder’s. A scrapbook pulled out of hiding showed the bike in its heyday, looking very well turned-out, with its beaming, longhaired owner and his pretty girlfriend (now wife) sitting astride.

“I’d always hoped to get it in one of the chopper mags back then,” he said wistfully.

Mark’s $400 asking price was fair, but I almost felt guilty handing over the check, like I was hauling away a treasured family pet. Before leaving, I gave him a chance to call the deal off. “No,” he answered after a thoughtful pause, “I’ll never get around to re-doing it. Maybe you will.” Slow progress is underway, courtesy of the “Chopper Friends Network.” When he found out my BSA was in need of that staple of chopperdom, a chrome sissybar, AccuTrue’s Bruce Fischer donated a tastily bent length of solid Vi-inch tubing lopped off a customer’s Harley rebuild. It’ll eventually hold a 1930s car taillight acquired through eBay (very cool, with “STOP” molded into its glass lens).

Cobra’s Denny Berg suggested I toss the crusty front end and replace it with something from his rafters, a 10-inchover Yamaha XT500 front end complete with Borrani alloy rim, new ribbed Cheng Shin tire, a mini-Bates headlight and very swank Z-bars atop dogbone risers. Let me have the whole shebang for probably less than the cost of the chromer’s bill, then fired up his lathe and proceeded to mate it to the BSA’s headstock.

When Feature Editor Mark Hoyer and I were up in Portland, Oregon, for last year’s “Mining for Old” story about the reselling of “Sandy Bandit” Cliff Majhor’s 40-year stock of Britbike parts, I came across a pristine NOS right-side muffler for an early BSA Triple. Much maligned in their time, these “rayguns” were a tad overstyled, sure, but look pretty damn good today mounted at a jaunty angle on a certain Lightning chopper. New owners of the Majhor collection, Mike Reilly and Greg Hult, let me have one for a very kind price (restore -niks, save your angry mail, there’s a crateful of the things still up there; get yours at www.classiccyclespares.com).

All of which. I’ve just realized, is a very long lead-in to the best motorcycle book published last year, Tom Zimberoff’s Art of the Chopper (Motorbooks International, 800/826-6600; www.motorbooks.com). In its 255 pages, Zimberoff tracks down, photographs and profiles 20 of today’s top chopper builders. A photo-journalist by trade, his informal B&W portraits (like Orange County Choppers’ Teutuls shown here in a rare functional moment) are a highlight, but he also taught himself to be a very talented studio shooter, and his words are pretty good, too. Color me jealous.

In fact, I’d rate the whole book just one chopped BSA short of perfection. □