|
|
1885 - 1940: The Early Years The
bicycle craze swept America in the late 1800s. But it didn't take long for riders to decide that while it was nice to
be able to move along at a speed faster than a walk, it would seem better to clip down the road as fast as a horse could trot
- and without working up a sweat on hills. The first attempt to power a bike involved mounting a steam engine in the
frame, but the idea of having a high-pressure boiler under the seat of one's pants never really caught on. In
1885, the legendary German investor Gottlieb Daimler equipped a bicycle with a four-stroke internal combustions engine.
The contraption chugged along for seven miles before catching fire, an inevitable drawback when you consider
that Daimler's power plant used an open-pool carburetor in which fumes from an exposed pan of gasoline were drawn into the
combustion chamber. Even by the most devil-may-car standards of modern bikers, this has to seem no more appealing than
wrapping your jeans around a steam engine.) Another ten years passed before a safe one-cylinder motor was successfully
installed on a bike, and the motorcycle industry took off from there. The motorcycle's bicycle origins
are readily apparent in the spare, simple designs of the early years, almost all of which were based on the traditional diamond
frame still used on today's human-powered two-wheelers. No matter where the early builders stuck the engine - above
the front wheel, behind the seat, over the rear hub, and finally in the V of the diamond frame beneath the rider - anyone
could tell you that what they were looking at was a "chopped" bicycle. Even after 1903, when William Harley
and Arthur Davidson started betting their future on a tree-horsepower motor whose original carburetor was made out of a tomato
can, the bicycle heritage was still so dominant that a rider had to stop a 1905 Harley by pedaling backwards: there
were no brakes, front or rear. The 1920s By the second
decade of the twentieth century, motorcycles had began to look like like motorcycles - and they had captured the American
imagination in much the same way that bicycles had a generation earlier. And they weren't merely for sport on weekends.
Cheap and easily maintained, the machines of motorcycling's adolescent years were a practical, everyday way to travel.
All that changed when Henry Ford made four wheels and a roof an almost equally inexpensive alternative.
Cheap automobiles made motorcycles more of a specialty item, promoted more for sportiness and power than as a means of basic
transportation. Single-cylinder pre-World War I motorcycles could generally manage 30 mph, maybe a bit more, and were
more than adequate for getting around town. By the 1920s, though, machines powered by engines such as Harley-Davidson's
V-Twin, with its pair of cylinders set longitudinally at a 45 degree angle, or Indian's similar two-cylinder arrangement or even
its big fours, could easily hit 75 or 80 mph. Speed was of the essence, an in a new generation of riders discovered the manufacturers
were offering them something than wasn't just their fathers' bicycle-with-a-motor anymore. The next step was to take
these production models and raise the ante for performance. The 1930s - 1940s Today's chopper builders rely on a dizzying array of after-market components, both functional and cosmetic. This grab bag of parts enables professional and amateur builders alike to replace virtually
every piece of a stock motorcycle, to the point where only a small portion of the finished product - perhaps not much more
than the frame - is factory original. Or, in the case of superbly equipped shops such as Orange County Choppers, much
of the machine can be fabricated to one-of-kind specifications and married to appropriate stock components. But back
when racers and other aficionados first started seriously modifying stock motorcycles with an eye toward squeezing out an
extra measure of performance, no one dreamed of going to a parts mega-mart and filling a shopping cart with parts, the way Paul Sr. and young Cody did
in the "Old School" episode of American Chopper. Back then, in the 1930s and 1940s, building a better
bike at home was a matter of what you took off, rather than what you replaced or added on. It was all
about weight. Who needed that fat front fender, anyway If it was good for anything at all, maybe it could be chopped
short and used in place of the big, heavy rear fender, the way Paul, Sr did on the Orange Knucklehead in his "Senior
Series" line of Old School bikes. The front brake, too, was often looked at as an expendable item. The Senior
Series' Orange Bobber dispenses with this component in homage to its ancestors, but if performance were the object, a modern
perforated disc setup wouldn't have meant much in terms of weight. But the old drum brakes were a good deal heavier,
and they got the axe. So did stock mufflers, which not only added pounds but restricted the engine's ability to breathe
freely. The lights could go, too, if you weren't planning to ride at night. And today's exposed-belt primary drives,
a modern chopper fixture that goes a long way towards promoting the machines' nothing-to-hide, whiff-of-danger image, date
back to the scuttling of heavy primary covers on the chopped stock bikes. They were called "bobbers," because they were "bobbed" like in a 1920s women's hairdo, or the tail on a Doberman Pincher. They
stood in marked contrast to most of the conventional stock motorcycles of their day, particularly the sleek, sheet metal-swathed
machines manufactured by Indian starting in the mid 1930s and culminating in the voluptuous 1947 Indian Chief, whose sleek
valanced fenders concealed fully half of both the front and rear wheels. Bobbing a bike became a means not only of making
it leaner and faster; it served to distinguish its owner from the more genteel clientele drawn to the fully accoutered stock
motorcycles. I you want a car, the bobber seemed to say, then go buy a car, this is how a motorcycle ought to look, sound, and perform. The 1940s:
A New Biker Culture The years immediately following World War II saw an upsurge in interest in motorcycling
in general, and customization in particular. A number of returning veterans took motorcycling either as inexpensive transportation - especially as
factories freed from war production demands retooled for the civilian trade, and military surplus bikes became available - or as a pastime that helped release
restless energy pent us during service. But the more demanding riders weren't altogether satisfied with what the American
companies Indian and Harley-Davidson had to offer and hadn't yet encountered the post-war British vanguard of Triumph, Norton,
and BSA, (in those days, Japanese bikes weren't even a blip on the horizon). Besides, many vets couldn't afford brand-new
machines and were forced to apply their ingenuity to bikes built back in the 1930s. The ingenuity,
of course, was applied to more than simply jettisoning unnecessary poundage. Dropping weight was one way to make motorcycles
go faster: another was increasing horsepower. A 1936 Harley with an overhead valve Knucklehead V-Twin engine put out 40 hp; twelve years later, the new Panhead V-Twin added fifteen more horses to the corral. The two-cylinder power plant on Indian's 1935 Sport Scout was good for 25
hp, upped to 40 on the heavy 1948 Chief. How to beef up the output on machines like these? In those days, it wasn't
simply a matter of finding the website for a good after-market speed shop. Cylinders were bored out to accommodate larger
pistons; bigger carburetors were installed to allow the modified engines to drink fuel at a faster rate. Some backyard
innovators even went to dual carbs. And quicker acceleration was achieved by trimming weight from flywheels.
During those postwar years, it wasn't only motorcycles that
were diverging into the two separate categories of the modified and the unmodified, the bobbed and the unbobbed, the chopped
and the unchopped. As motorcycling mover further from the realm of utilitarian transportation and became more aware
of a sport, motorcycle riders tended also to divide into different camps. There were the weekend riders, who didn't
tend to fuss a whole lot with the finger points of performance engineering and modify the weight and appearance of their machines;
and enthusiasts for whom motorcycling became an important a part of their lives as anything else they did. And out of
that minority, an even smaller sliver of the motorcycle demographic became the focus of one of the first media-manufactured
social phenomena - the biker. The media wasn't entirely responsible. In the late 1940s, there
really were motorcycle clubs (that may be too formal a word) with now-quaint names. And of course, the most notorious
and long-lived of all the wrong-side-of-the tracks outfits also sprang to life in this era. But the "one percent,"
as some antisocial bikers liked to call themselves, would likely have gotten no more notice than any other percentage that
small if it hadn't been for overblown reporting and a rash of Hollywood films based on their exploits. The
1950s: The Biker Era Begins The creation of the bad-biker image began in earnest at a motorcycle
rally - officially, the "Fourth of July Gypsy Tour and Races" held in the small inland town of Hollister, California,
in 1947. Some of the 4,000 motorcyclists showed up. Some were club members, some were not; some rode bobbers, some didn't; some were drunk, many were sober. And to this day, there is quite a bit of controversy about just how
much mayhem and vandalism the worst of the lot were responsible for. But the facts mattered less and less, as American
was treated to sensationalized media accounts of the event that crystallized in a single photograph, a cover shot accompanying
a Life magazine story on the event. The photo showed a paunchy oaf in dirty khaki pants and a shirt open to
his waist, straddling a front fender-less Harley that looked as badly groomed as he was. Although the
man seemed to be intoxicated, most later accounts insists that he was posted in the saddle by the photographer. No matter.
The picture, the Life article, and a 1951 Hollister-inspired short story in the more highbrow Harper's titled "The Cyclists' Raid" all contributed mightily
toward creating postwar America's first homegrown bugbear, the outlaw biker. He and she merged with the all-purpose
juvenile delinquent to strike more fear and revulsion into the hearts of decent folks than anyone other than the Communists
under the bed. What started out as bad publicity for motorcyclists turned into box office when
Hollywood made the biker subculture the focus of 1951's The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando. Producer Stanly Kramer did his homework, spending three weeks with Brando slumming with real-life
motorcycle clubs, and chose an event strikingly similar to the Hollister fracas as the main event of the film - in fact, it
was the Harper's story that was the basis for the script. Brando oozed rebellious attitude as a character who
looked like anything but the lug on the Life cover, and he drove a factory-fresh Triumph whose choice for a starring
role reflected that a fast new wave of British bikes had stormed America since the Hollister days. It was Lee Marvin,
playing Brando's nemesis, who rode a ratty bobbed Harley that more closely resembled the bike in the Life photo.
Dated it might be, but The Wild One still rates at least three stars from most reviewers. It
was followed however, by a decade and a half of low-budget biker films such as Motorcycle Gang and Dragstrip
Riot. As far as motorcycling's image was concerned, the damage was done. It wasn't really fair, but since
Americans love a whiff of .... well, not danger, exactly, but at least a sort of raffishness in the enthusiasms they embrace,
the movies did keep alive a sense that there were modern cowboys among us that they made their machines their own image, and
the certainly looked like they were having fun. Just as the attention of journalists and filmmakers began to give motorcycles
- and especially modified motorcycles - a cultural gloss that had nothing to do with practical matters of engineering and
performance, trends in after-market tinkering began to move away from the old down-to earth practices of the bobber crowd and toward the creation of machines chopped as much for the style they projected as for the quarter-mile times they
could post. After all, the 1950s saw an influx of British bikes that didn't have to shed pounds because they had never
been overweight in the first place, and that took advantge of newer ideas in engineering. Triumph's overhead valve parallel
twin engine, its cylinders standing in start vertical contrast to the Harley and Indian V-twins, powered Brando's Thunderbird
in The Wild One and claimed a postwar victory in the Daytona 200. In 1956, BSA was able to squeeze 110 mph out of its lightweight 499cc
single-cylinder engines. And Norton's 1953 Dominator didn't just get its name from the marketing department. But
it was the American bikes that still appealed to riders who wanted to set themselves apart from the crowd. The American
bikers - the term had been coined following the 1947 Hollister event - certainly weren't averse to going faster than the next guy. But they weren't going to seek pure speed at the expense
of the panache that the big Harleys and Indians projected, and still project today to loyalists who consider it irrelevant
when someone suggests that German bikes might be more technologically sophisticated, Italian bikes more rakish, or Japanese
bikes faster. It was a mind-set that reflected the car culture of the era. Ferrari and Jaguar and the gullwing
Mercedes-Benz 300-SL might have been the last word in sports motorings in the 1950s, but try telling that to someone whose
main interest was in looking drop-dead cool at the drive in. He'd rather be in a stock Mercury convertible - or, if
his tastes and mechanical skills ran in that direction, a Merc or Lincoln from the late 1940s that had been chopped and channeled.
This brings us to where the car world and the motorcycle world of the 1950s converge, and it might shed a
little light on the term "chopper" itself. Just as there was a street rod culture that wanted to take what
Detroit served up and give it a leaner, meaner appearance by getting rid of extraneous chrome, lowering overall profiles,
and layering on lacquer in black, deep purple, and other dead-of-night tones, there were bikers who went for a stripped-down,
minimalistic look. Conversely, there were those among both the four and two-wheel set who went in for gaudy add-ons
(in the '50s, car makers were more than happy to do this for you). In addition to snazzy paint jobs, going this route
for a biker back then might have meant tacking on a sissy bar, or going int for the earliest of the "apehanger"
high-rise handlebars that later came to typify custom motorcycles to a lot of people outside the community. Flared, shotgun, and organ-style exhaust pipes might also fit the picture.
And what about the word "chopper"? Even with a term so relatively new, precise etymology is a tricky business. The simplest version of the
story is that "chop" means much the same thing as "bob," referring to no more than the act of taking things
off. But by the time "chopper" began to replace "bobber" as the generic term for a non-stock motorcycle, the doctoring that was being done would often involve putting things
on as much as taking them off. That's where the custom-car word "chopped" seems to come into the picture.
A car has been "chopped" when its roof has been lowered by the removing sections of the posts and door frames, and
abbreviating the height of the windshield and window glass. ("Channeling" is when the customizer lowers the floor-pan accordingly, so someone of normal height can drive the thing.) Thus "chopping" came
to represent streamlining, a lowered profile, and a slouchy, edgy look. The 1960s:
Chopper Counterculture By the early 1960s, extended front forks became an inseparable part of the chopper look. This was a sure sign that style was rivaling improved performance as a hallmark of motorcycle customization. Unless you are drag racing, in which case turning radius and handling through curves doesn't matter, there is no practical
advantage to having your front wheel arrive at your destination a week before you do. But the lines of a bike with a
raked-out front end were something altogether new in the real world. To a lot of people, they made conventional machines
look pudgy and blunt. They made a motorcycle look as if it were flying down the desert highway when it was standing
at a stoplight in Bayonne, New Jersey, and they were here to stay. In the '50s and through most
of the '60s, you couldn't just walk into a parts shop and order forks to your preferred length, as if they were pants.
Instead, you cut and spliced, cannibalizing old springer forks. This kind of backyard engineering led to chopper builders having to become proficient in geometry, particularly geometry as is applied to the angle created by the forward
rake of the motorcycle's neck from the down-tubes. The longer the forks you wanted, the greater the angle of rake would
have to be. And in order to allow that more extreme rake, and to keep the lengthened forks from approaching the horizontal,
the longer the down-tubes would have to be. But if you extend the down-tubes significantly, you may well have to stretch
the backbone of the frame in order to keep it from climbing too steeply toward the neck. The whole idea is to create
a machine that will not only look good, but will be comfortable to ride for more than a short distance and be maneuverable
once it leaves the straightaways. Also no to be ignored is the fact that rake and fork length affect trail, defined
as the distance between a point directly below a motorcycle's front axle and an imaginary line extended through the neck.
It is the correct amount of trail - generally three or four inches, but negotiable if a builder know what he is doing - that
makes for safe steering on turns. So, what had started with a hacksaw back in bobber days now proceeded
with a hacksaw and a welding torch, as fron end and frame sections were pierced in to existing equipment. Soon the front
controls and footrest pegs moved forward, and even the rider's position had changed. Slowly but surely, the after-market
parts industry caught up with do-it-yourselfers. Narrower front wheels appeared, to accentuate the look created by extending
forks. The forks themselves started to become available in custom lengths. Eventually, even specialty frames came
on the market, advertised according to how many inches "over" stock their backbones and down-tubes were. The
templates for these custom frames were the standard stock skeletons used by motorcycle manufacturers, so that the effect achieved
would be the same you would get from, say, adding ten inches to the down-tubes on a particular year and model of Harley-Davidsons.
Somewhere in time after the era of the pure bobbers, but before it became possible to build a chopper entirely from the ground up out of parts catalogs - somewhere in the 1960s, let's say - came to heyday of what has since
been known as the "Old School" chopper. Although "Old School" sounds like a term harking back to the early days of motorcycling - or at least of
bobbing or chopping - it actually refers to the style of customized bikes that according to Paul, Sr., "really became popular in the late sixties, especially after Easy Rider."
As Senior said when he and apprentice Cody Connelly started building their Old School bike on American Chopper, "I've
always liked that look - it's a throwback to the old choppers I started building back then." What were the trademarks of the Old School? The bikes the chopper builders started out with were almost invariably Harleys - today, frame suppliers model their offerings on the Harley frames
used in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. The frame would be rigid - no soft tails need apply - and the only rear suspension was provided by the big springs under the ample leather seat.
Up front, suspension was typically a job for springer rather than hydraulic forks, and they were usually extended. You
started he machine the way you once started all motorcycles, by kicking down on a fold-out foot lever rather than by simply
turning a key. And there was no question about the wheels: they would be wire. Even if the intricate patterns
precision-cut into modern alloy wheels had been available and affordable to the chopper builders who created the Old School look, they would have insisted on the spoke jobs. As with the
Old School chopper Senior and Cody built on American Chopper, a foot-operated clutch and a jockey shift were likely to appear on the
original examples of the genre. Unlike the conventional hand clutch and foot-operated shift arrangement, the jockey
shift recalls earlier days of motorcycle engineering in requiring the rider to remove one hand from the handlebars in order
to change gears. That's the reason for its other, less benign nickname, the "suicide shift." Old
School traditions even run to color, and that generally means not too much of it. Black and chrome were the prevailing
combination, with perhaps some modest use of gold leaf - "Back in the day," says Senior, "that was a pretty
popular look with choppers." Back in that particular day - the 1960s - choppers were starting to loom as on more aspect of what would come to be known as the counterculture. Not that choppers were ever especially identified with hippies, or with the predecessors, the beatniks: if a beatnik rode anything with
two wheels, it would probably have been a ratty little European scooter, and when hippies came along, they tended to shy away
from anything too loudly and brashly American. The Volkswagen bus was their vehicle of choice, and for a hippie to get
too cozy with a Harley would almost be like admitting he liked football or fishing. It wasn't so much that choppers and the people who rode them failed to fit the conventional mold. It was that the 1960s were shaping up as a time when there was less and less of a conventional mold to fit. Being a "character"
of some sort - anti-establishment student, surf bum, biker - was getting to be the norm, and if there was one thing the younger,
more progressive element stood for in those days, it was tolerance. In an era that told you to do your own thing, how
could anyone object to the thing you chose to do? Hippies may not have ridden choppers, but they nodded an approving "That's cool" to even the most repellent of the people who did - at least, until
the 1969 Altamont concert decision to use a motorcycle club as security, and a spectator was killed. But recalling Altamont is going far off track, into the realm of the
fabled, self-labeled "one percent." The fact is that bikers, and choppers, were being welcomed into the counter-cultural pantheon of the 1960s. And it was about time: after all, what
ran more counter to the prevailing culture than the bobber crowd of twenty years earlier?
As bikers become more and more a part of the landscape,
their machines began to reflect the fact that, in the America of the 1960s, if was becoming possible to purchase individuality.
It still would have been lightly unusual to buy an out-of-the-box chopper, either ready-made or in parts, but the day was long past when all modifications had to be made on a wing and a prayer and
a trip to the junkyard. Along with engine performance kits, a market arose in specialty forks, frames, tanks, exhaust
pipes, handlebars and seats, and mail-order was the next logical step. And a growing number of chromers and paint shops
came to specialize in motorcycle work. Then, at the tail end of the 1960s, a movie made on a budget of $400,000
put choppers squarely in the forefront of the era's youth culture and everything it stood for. Easy Rider
wasn't a film about motorcycles. Today, it's mainly remembered as an artifact of the do-your-own-thing-era, and as the
movie that ushered in a golden age for free-wheeling, independent (or at least independent-minded) film-making. As in
The Wild One, the bikes in Easy Rider were a metaphor for a certain way of life. They were vehicles that represented freedom
- not the freedom to hassle straight society, the way the characters did in the earlier film, but to get away from the hassles
that straight society itself threw in the path of free spirits everywhere. Easy Rider simply told the story
of two young men set out to look for America. One of them - the one played by Peter Fonda - even went by the name "Captain
America" (the Dennis Hopper character was simply know as "Billy the Kid"). They aren't too happy with
the America they find, and the feeling is mutual. At the end of the film, they are shot to death by beady-eyed locals.
One bad step for peace and love, one giant step for choppers: After the effect of the depressing ending wore off, what a lot of people remembered about Easy Rider was
the motorcycles. Captain America's bike was a particularly handsome take on the Old School look, clean-lined and uncluttered
chopped Harleys whose single not to modern times was the stars-and-stripes paint job on the gas tank. The same flag
motif appeared on the Captain's helmet, which spent more time perched atop the sissy bar than on Peter Fonda's head.
Using the American flag's design and color scheme this way carried a double-edged message back in 1969 - on the one hand,
it suggested irreverence toward a symbol revered by straight America: on the other, it spoke of a deeper love of country
and slightly tinged by irony. Things are very different today Paul Teutul, Jr.'s red, white, and blue welding mask is
a plainly patriotic statement with no nuances of meaning. But the bikes were unambiguous. To young moviegoers, they spelled
freedom. Here was a chopper portrayal that could unite mainstream Americans and counterculture types alike, and initiate
thousands of new converts to a world bikers had known about for years. Whether you were searching for America or searching
for a burger, doing it on a chopper suddenly had immense appeal. The Easy Rider phenomenon coincided with a number of other influences that helped
push motorcycles to the forefront of popular culture. As the wave of '50s nostalgia crested, Fonzie on Happy Days
became known as much for his motorcycle as for his leather jacket (were the two ever separated). The British influx
was starting to subside, but Japanese machines were making a big impression with American buyers. After-market kits for performance and/or appearance modifications had gone multicultural, to use a more modern word, and you could doctor a Honda or Yamaha
as well as a Harley. A sure sign that the customization craze was approaching the saturation point was the introduction by mainstream manufacturers of stock bikes that looked like
choppers. This marked the point reached in so many fads, when the purists who started the thing begin to regret the overexposure
and commercialization that have brought in a superficially interested cast of characters for whom the term "knucklehead" might well take on a different meaning. The Modern Era: Surviving the Times To reach their
current level of popularity, choppers had to survive that period in which they were so co-opted by pop culture that they risked heading for the scrap heap with
disco and Earth Shoes. They also had to face down a backlash that took the shape of stricter motor vehicle codes, dictating
what sort of after-market equipment was legal on machines that motor vehicle departments still considered street transportation. But the chopper tradition, by now more than sixty years old, was too deeply entrenched a part of Americana to wash out with last week's fads.
Perhaps the most important reason for the survival of choppers is that they are not merely individualistic themselves, but they are the work of individuals. Trends that fizzle out
are almost always trends that have started out as marketing gimmicks, ideas hatched by corporations and hyped until the public
grows tired of them. Choppers came into being at the grassroots level, as the work of individual craftspeople working at many different levels of expertise,
and they are no more likely to fade away than handmade furniture or custom goldsmithing. Today's chopper builders remain individuals, and their work has taken them in more different directions that the old bob-job crowd could
ever have imagined. The ground rules may be that a bike has to perform well and look good, but there are a million ways
to go from there. Some builders hew to the Old School, as Paul Teutul, Sr. does with the "Senior Series."
Some head as far in the other direction as possible, opting for a seamless sculptural flow that blurs the borders between
frames, tanks, and fenders. And then there are the theme bikes, a realm of chopper building that the Teutuls and American Chopper have taken to lengths unexplored by any other shop. It's
taken more than a century to go from dropping a steam engine into a bicycle, to the space-age wizardry of the Teutuls' Future
bike. Along the way the concept of choppers went from taking things off, to adding things on, to creating a one-of-a-kind
motorcycle from the ground up. Each, in its own way, is an American Chopper.
|
|
