Radial Hell
RADIAL HELL
CW EXCLUSIVE
Seven cylinders, no waiting.
JOHN BURNS
EVERYBODY KNOWS JESSE JAMES' CELEBRITY pit bull Cisco, but few know he also owns a two-legged chihuahua that hops around like a small dancing bear. And he also has the inside scoop on the Kid Rock/Pamela Anderson breakup, though we are not at liberty to divulge. Not that he would've brought it up if I hadn't pried, but I am a dogged reporter. Get it?
Anyway, why build a radial aircraft-engined motorcycle? The more you think about it, the more you realize that for guys like JJ that is a ridiculous question. He built it for the same reason Edmund Hillary climbed Everest. And whoever asked Sir Ed that question must've gotten the same look. Because it was there. In JJ’s case, “Just to see if I could do it.” That and a client hired him to build Radial Hell, a guy named Ballantine who is trying to, or already has, patented a Rotee radial aircraft-engined motorcycle and hopes to market them. All together now: Pay up, sucker. So, the answer is yes, JJ can build a radial-engined motorcycle-just like he seems able to accomplish pretty much whatever he decides to do, whether that’s building a small motorcycle/industrial complex from scratch, renovating a hundred-year-old Long Beach laundry across the street to expand
into, or wooing/wedding a genuine major motion-picture star (the amputee chihuahua is actually Ms. Bullock’s). Basically, there are plenty of reasons to despise Jesse James but you just can’t do it, because he’s also a genuinely Nice Guy who seems to actually care when he asks how your kid is doing, and he even bussed the table after buying everybody lunch at the burger place he owns next door-Cisco’s-where you can get a really good burger for like $6. Maybe there are nasty moments among JJ and crew when crack moto-joumalists are not snooping around, but I don’t think so. West Coast Choppers looks and sounds like one of
the happiest, metal-bangingest, spray-paintingest places on Earth-Disneyland for the gearhead. Custom Cadillacs in progress, motorcycles, German tourists, L.A. Kings hockey players shopping for things worthy of their peak-eamings-years’ wealth...this is The Place. And I didn’t ask how many tattooed elves JJ now employs, but WCC is the proverbial beehive of activity in a town where the only other industry is trucks rattling up the shell-shocked 710 freeway loaded with goods literally just off the boat from China. Watching the crew unload long bars of steel from a flatbed as a team is like viewing old photos of guys building the Hoover Dam. No slackers at West Coast Choppers. “Everybody here is a self-starter,” says JJ. “Nobody needs to be told what to do. Ever. That’s how it works.”
ife is a one-lap race," according to the man who also publishes his own magazine (Garage), operates his sown in-house advertising department and just got back from running a wicked tube-framed truck with 26 inches of suspension travel in the Baja 1000. (When its first engine died pre-race, the crew flew in another one overnight and
put it together to make the start with 20 minutes to spare, or something ridiculous like that.) While some of us are still waiting for the rulebook to arrive in the snail-mail, JJ races full speed ahead.
Which makes it all the more amazing that he could put together something as of-a-piece as Radial Hell. Take one new, Australia-sourced, seven-cylinder Rotee engine and a West Coast Choppers Dominator frame, and have at it. James estimates he put 2000 hours into the project, so much that he’s now “sick of looking at it, ready to move on to the next thing.”
The hardest part was taking power from the rear of the engine instead of from the front, where the propeller should be. Years of experience gave JJ the sense to farm that task out to a radial specialist who’d done it before. After that, it was a simple matter of turning the power flowing through the shiny new rear-exiting driveshaft 90 degrees through a custom bevel-drive transfer box, feeding it via a wide rubber belt into the standard Baker six-speed H-D-style gearbox, and rearward to the wheel through the chain final drive. Simple except that JJ got bad information the first time as to which way the radial spins and had to reverse the whole thing after the bike wanted to go backward. A small setback.
Now that it’s all done, the result looks so neat it seems like anybody could do it, no? When you look at a thing a while, you realize that’s what sets apart those things that are done right. And it would all be as useless and absurd as some of the other “custom” motorcycles we have ridden lately, if not for the fact that this bike actually works. We’ll be needing a bigger battery or a more potent starter, but once five or six of the merry men from the shop give a nice shove, Radial Hell fires right up and runs as good as it looks. After it dies a few times, that is, and JJ asks who put gas in? Ah, nobody... But
that’s an amusing thing, not an opening to abuse the help.
In any case, pulling six or seven guys away from their real jobs to bump Radial Hell to life inspired JJ to begin an Oral Draft of the West Coast Choppers Manifesto, similar to the one posted by JJ’s friend Matt Chambers over at Confederate.
Article One: Here at West Coast Choppers, we believe that starting one ’s machine should be as inclusive a process as riding it, involving as one the entire community in the ignition process. From each according to his personal bipedal thrust, to each according to his lack of amperage...
It seems like my official Cycle World ride of Radial Hell is also the shakedown cruise, and aside from the starting system, it turns out I had nothing to be worried about at all. The days I spent re-reading Chuck Yeager’s autobiography were pretty much wasted (though that is a surprisingly good read) and the parachute was unnecessary. Once gassed and fired up, the Radial’s quieter than just about any other machine loitering around West Coast Choppers. The kids were a little worried that without a propeller out front to bathe the cylinders in air, they might overheat, but that didn’t seem to be a problem at all once rolling-though I think at least a vestigial propeller would’ve been a nice touch.
What looks like the fuel tank actually holds about five quarts of oil, which helps keep things cool. The Rotee comes with a Bing carburetor that might work all right on an airplane at a steady throttle setting, but the WCC crew replaced it with a single S&S carb that feeds a big impeller deal at the rear of the engine which spins fuel out to all seven cylinders {to each according to its ambition to combust, thus providing fonx’ard progress for all...). JJ was a little concerned since he’d never worked with such a thing, but the Rotee people must know what they’re doing, because Radial Hell responds to the throttle just like a normal, well-carbureted motorcycle and a really smooth one at that.
About the only fly in the ointment is that the thing weeps a little oil. An e-mail to our in-house radial Rasputin, Kev Cameron, informs us that in order to be light enough to fly, radiais are built a little, well, light, and therefore a little flexy, which means oil usually leaks out around pushrod junctions and things. In fact, KC says it wasn’t unusual for a B-29 engine to lose like 40 quarts on a long flight. Or was that gallons? The B-29 radial was a little bigger, though3350 cubic inches and 18 cylinders in a 2800-pound package good for 2200 horsepower at 2800 rpm. You’ll be needing
four of them, sir. As for Jesse James, he swears he will never again ride in a radial-powered aircraft. As for me, a few more oil spots in the driveway would have to fight for attention. Ill
a he Rotee R2800’s seven cylI inders add up to 2800 cubic I centimeters and 110 horsepower at 3700 rpm; there’s no payoff in having a propeller engine spin much faster because then the prop would just chop up the air instead of pushing it smoothly behind. Matter of fact, in airplane use this particular engine gets geared down to spin the prop at a nice, efficient 2400 rpm.
In Radial Hell use the effect is not unlike a really big, big-block Chevy in a light car but minus the top-end hit. The bike doesn’t much care what gear you start off in; it just rolls eas-
ily away, with a really broad, flat, effortless powerband-and the Baker six-speed shifts nicely enough, so it’s no problem to dial up pretty good speed pronto. Not that I got going more than maybe 70 in the alley. Current price of the R2800 is $13,750. Just let the Rotee people know, they’ll have one on the boat for you asap.
I hate to point it out, but this West Coast Chopper has plastic on it-the Brembo front-brake master and clutch assemblies use plastic reservoirs. Blasphemy! Or not. JJ admits the things work so well, why not use them? I second that emotion. Radial Hell weighs maybe 100 or 150 pounds more than the typical V-Twin chopper, but hand controls actually designed for hands mean it feels as nice to ride and as easy to control with your normal human digits as a Honda Gold
Wing or something. Modern hydraulics, who knew? No matter how cool levers made from steam locomotive pushrods or cavalry sabers or whatever might look, bikes are for riding.
In fact, Radial Hell works so well and seems so civilized that if not for the little starting issue, I would’ve felt fine going someplace on it. As it was, JJ and crew soon grew bored with it and fired up JJ’s daily driver for a little fun in the alley out back. That would be his 525-horsepower turbo Hayabusa, the one with the big air-cleaner poking out the side, the extended swingarm and the Öhlins suspension. Hey, watch this. One second the bike is down there, under the overpass where the driver of the meat truck’s lunch-break rendezvous with a local girl is being rudely interrupted by the noise and tire smoke. Zot. The next second JJ’s grinning mug is flashing by at 140-ish. Suddenly it’s break time at several small businesses off the alley. Oh, it’s that Monster Garage guy again... I think he made about 10 passes on the ’Busa, timing it nicely to avoid the tanker trucks coming and going from the Praxair plant, and insisted I take a spin, too. Well, thanks, but I really probably...well, okay. Yes, JJ’s daily transportation is the fastest bike I have ever ridden. Even at like half-throttle. I wonder how many of the currently invogue chopper guys on TV ride a turbo ’Busa?
Here’s a secret: There’s a turbo Hayabusa engine just like that one in a Dominator frame on a work table in JJ’s office. It is next on the list of things to do.
“Uh, Jesse,” I ask, “how useful is 525 horsepower going to be in a frame with no rear suspension?”
“What? Imagine all that power with none of it lost to a spring or suspension! A five-hundred horsepower digger...” He gets that glinting madman look again.
What do I know? Along with Ruby the dancing chihuahua and the digger in the office are, among lots of other things, a ’50s streamliner car with a twin-turbo big-block Chevy JJ wants to set a land-speed record with-on hydrogen. There’s
the latest in digital photography equipment, lots of drawings and a bunch of machine tools and presses and huge things from the Industrial Age used for God knows what, which, set against the backdrop of the aged bricks in the old building, really do take you back to a time when they actually built things in California besides prisons.
I can be a little cynical, but West Coast Choppers really is a sort of happy-ending Hollywood story, with JJ keeping the bank from going under and saving the town or at least a small corner of it. Who knew a guy who started out building choppers would morph into an actual philanthropist. Not only has JJ put quite a few Long Beachians to work, he’s also given a bunch more people a nice place to have lunch in a part of the city where the choice is otherwise maybe a 40-ouncer in a paper bag. And the price is right, too: Cisco’s
six-buck burgers will cost you twice that much a couple miles away in upscale Belmont Shore. The cynical me would’ve expected the JJ trajectory to be more in the direction of Jesse’s Bel Air Production and Motorcycle Company, specializing in Franklin Mint choppers numbered and personally autographed by the man himself. That, thankfully, is not how JJ rolls.
As a matter of fact, there’s a happy ending for Radial Hell just in over the e-mail transom: Being an airplane engine, for safety it has two ignition systems-one electronic, the other a magneto backup. Turns out we were trying to start the thing on the magneto. Once switched over to the main electronic system, the Vanilla Gorilla says, the thing fires right up with a twist of the key and runs like a champ. At West Coast Choppers, wonders never cease. O
