Custom Motorcycles All the Rage but Out of Reach for Average Joe

May 20–You’ve probably seen them on the roads in the past week: custom motorcycles. They stand out from the bike crowd because they’re taller (or shorter), longer, louder, flashier and more powerful than most bikes.

They cost between $28,000 and $250,000. They’re usually not comfortable to ride for long. So why are customized bikes so popular?

Looks, say bikers and builders.

Buyers can decide — part by part, upholstery to paint job — how they want their bikes built. The resulting individualized look gets attention.

“A custom motorcycle is a personalized vehicle. Everybody wants a personalized vehicle,” said Gary Woodford of Milwaukee Iron, a custom motorcycle shop in Lynchburg, Va., that is featured in a TV series called “Southern Steel” on The Discovery Channel.

“A lot of guys use it as a status symbol,” said bike builder Kendall Johnson of Winston-Salem, N.C., who also has been featured on the Discovery Channel.

“The men are buying them to catch the women. Then the women catch the men and make them sell the bikes,” Woodford said with a grin.

You won’t catch Eddie Smith of Smithville, N.C., on a one-of-a-kind chopper any time soon. He checked out some high-end custom bikes at SBB Four Corners earlier this week.

“You pay $65,000, and you can’t get parts,” Smith said. “We call them barhoppers. You ride from one place to another and have people look at it. … I’d love to have it, but $65,000? Whew, that’s a lot of money.”

Smith said the bikes were fun to ogle but not affordable for most people. “The average guy, he does good to get a $25,000 Harley,” he said.

Even Woodford seemed a bit amazed and amused at how expensive custom bikes have become.

“I always say if I was going to pay that much money for something, it better have a front door,” Woodford said.

Woodford and other builders explained that parts, paint and labor make up a large chunk of a custom bike’s cost. Parts can cost $30,000; paint, up to $10,000; machine-shop labor can run $100 an hour.

Two types of custom bikes are choppers, which have high handlebars and long front ends, and pro street bikes, which are are extra-low and sleek — they look like a cat about to pounce on its prey — with fat tires.

Choppers reached their heyday in the ’60s and ’70s, bike builders said, and got their start when bikers began removing parts to subtract weight, moving parts around and adding parts to their Harley-Davidsons.

As there were few places to buy motorcycle parts, bikers built their own, to their own tastes.

“It was more of an outlaw-type thing,” said Randy Simpson, founder and president of Milwaukee Iron. “You weren’t socially acceptable, and you didn’t want to be.”

Mike Smith — who built bikes for Arlen Ness in Dublin, Ca., and now produces Ness’ road shows — said World War II veterans bought bikes because they were affordable and Vietnam vets bought bikes because the machines, like the vets, didn’t really fit into mainstream society.

“In the early ’70s, the guys who rode had to be pretty mechanical, and there was a stigma attached,” Smith said.

Movies — such as “The Wild One” with Marlon Brando and “Easy Rider” with Peter Fonda — and TV shows have done a lot to popularize and mainstream bikes, especially custom bikes such as choppers, builders said.

“When the TV stuff came out and Jesse James did the shows back in the ’90s, they’ve become more popular,” Simpson said.

Now there are a lot more companies building bikes and making bike parts, Simpson and Smith said.

“You’re able to build these motorcycles a lot easier,” Simpson said. “Now things are so readily available. Now several companies offer choppers in a kit.”

Smith said bike builders make more money from selling the parts they make than selling bikes.

“Our real business is parts,” Smith said. “Bikes are a great way to show what we build. The average person can’t buy [a custom bike], but they can say ‘I love those grips,’ and then he can get those for his Harley.”

Johnson said choppers are a fad, a trend.

“The chopper has about run its course,” Johnson said. “It’s on a five-year cycle. … There’s been, I’d say, 20 shops in a 50-mile radius of my shop that have gone out of business in the last two years.”

Johnson said he makes 18 to 20 bikes a year. He said his bikes cost between $45,000 and $60,000, and that he makes between $3,000 and $6,000 in profit from each bike.

“I don’t ever want to mass-produce our stuff,” Johnson said. “The bike wouldn’t have any personality.”

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