Starting with new well-made sheet metal will save on headaches down the road. It is just the right size to wrap around my 5.00-16 Firestone Deluxe Champion tire and the ribbing adds extra strength for when I need to load it down with gear for long trips. Out back I’ll be using a 6” Lowbrow Customs Stingray ribbed steel fender. I’m skipping on the front fender completely and will just be running a 21” front rim with a skinny 275-21 Firestone Classic ribbed tire. Sure I could weld up my own tank, but why reinvent the wheel just to say you built your own oil tank.
I’m storing the slippery stuff in Lowbrow’s Dimpled Steel oil tank which is already plumbed, comes with all the necessary threaded bungs to mount it solidly to the frame and works with their weld on frame mounts for easy installation. It holds 2 gallons of fuel, which means more gas stops, but I really like how it looks, so I am willing to trade cool looks for longer range. On the sheet metal end of things, I’m going with a Lowbrow Customs P-Nut Frisco Shallow Tunnel gas tank to help open up some space around the top of the motor. It doesn't have every mount you'll need, but it comes pretty close. The frame is already set up to accept my motor and frontend and has a lot of the mounts I need already welded on from the factory, which will be a big time saver. Specifically it is a S120EA, which has 0 stretch and a 35 degree rake on the front end (basically the same dimensions as stock, but with 5 degrees more rake). Who knows, one day when Sportsters are highly sought after collector’s items, I may want to restore it back to stock… So instead I picked up a complete frame from Paughco. A lot of people opt for a weld on hardtail which does save time and a lot of hassle at the DMV since you retain your original neck with the VIN number stamped into it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut my original frame. Once I had an idea of the geometry I wanted, the next step was to figure out what to do with the frame. This Sporty chop got the “Big Twin” treatment, never a good idea… I think this approach will help insure that I am headed in the right direction. Then I reached out to the owner and got some basic details on his build. To insure that I got this right the first time, I spent hours combing through Instagram until I finally spotted a bike with the right stance.
I want to hide as much wiring, cables, fasteners, etc as possible and just have a basic stripped-down chopper.
So, my plan is to keep everything clean and simple. Just do a Google search for “Sportster choppers” and you’ll see exactly what I am talking about. Either you completely fail at getting the lines right or you just dump way too much money into it that you will never be able to recoup. Now the first thing I discovered when I started researching for this build was that it is pretty easy to build a horrible Sportster. Ripping around the track at Keith Code's Superbike School in the late 1990’s. I’ll be detailing the entire process here on the Lowbrow Customs blog, so you can see just how easy (hopefully) it is to build a badass chopper using many of the quality parts available directly from Lowbrow and not breaking the bank in the process. Well, it’s taken almost 24 years, but sooner or later has finally arrived and I’ll be using my old Sporty as the basis for my first chopper build. Even then, I kept the Sportster around for sentimental reasons, figuring I’d do something with it sooner or later. I had a lot of adventures on that motorcycle over the next ten years and racked up over 70,000 miles on the clock before moving on to various other bikes. Waiting tables in the morning at the Hilton, bussing tables at night at Damon’s Grill, sleeping on the floor at my buddy’s sister’s house and taking in a steady diet of McDonald’s cheeseburgers.īy the end of the summer, I had saved up enough money to put a down payment on my first motorcycle, a 1996 Harley-Davidson XL1200C Sportster. I was living the life down in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Let me take you back to the summer of 1995.
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