It Started On A Dirt Bike At Eleven.
I have been building motorcycles since I was eleven years old.
I loved restructuring anything on wheels. By sixteen I had taken a 250cc dirt bike and dropped a 400cc motor into it. I had a Yamaha 500cc desert bike running a 605 Powroll kit. I raced. I was fearless. And over the years I never stopped paying attention to the industry — what was being built, what wasn't, and where the empty spaces were.
That instinct eventually pulled me toward Harley Davidson. I customized a few for myself, and the more I worked on them the more I noticed the same problem every other builder was running into. No matter how good your custom paint was, you only had a fuel tank, two fenders, the frame, and the oil bag to show it on. It was a strangely limited canvas for a motorcycle that the entire kustom world had built itself around.
Everyone was painting the same five surfaces.
"Most builders ask what they can paint on the surfaces this bike already has. I asked what surfaces this bike should actually have."
Then I noticed something nobody else seemed to be looking at. The Indian Motorcycle had full-skirt fenders. Wide, sweeping, beautiful — and they completely changed the proportion of the bike. I thought it over for a few weeks and came up with the concept: re-engineer the full-skirt fenders from the Indian to fit the new Harley Davidson models. Take the canvas the Indian had, and put it on the bike everyone was already buying.
I went to work. When the first bike came off the bench, I knew immediately I had something. I could now do a full themed paint job on a Harley — front fender to rear fender, every panel working as one piece of art instead of five disconnected ones.
Nobody was building bikes this way. I sold the first prototype for $75,000.
From there it became a body of work. A walnut wood theme with 24-karat gold leaf following the curves of the fenders. An Alien-themed build with airbrushed skull and chrome silver flames. A triple-flame wraparound across every paintable surface. Then the Budweiser theme bike — the one I am still proudest of. It came out as a piece of art. Distributors wanted them. I sold them to Budweiser distributors at $100,000 each.
I designed choppers. I designed bar-hog style bikes. And I started selling the Indian fender retrofit kits to other builders, because demand for the look I had created was outpacing what one shop could produce.
