SWEETIES & SCOOTERS

When Mike “Monkey” Sizemore was a kid, he had a little trouble waiting around for Santa Claus to get to his house. So early on, he decided he’d figure out a way to help the chubby old guy make his Christmas Eve rounds a little more quickly.

It wasn’t until Monkey was all grown up that he figured out how to help Santa out. The jolly old elf needed a chopper. One that was stylish, had a little attitude, and a little more speed than what reindeer provide.

With his mission clear, monkey got to work. The end result was a 2002 custom built chopper that certainly fills the bill.

Every once in a while, when a motorcycle is nearly the perfect ride just like it is, you still have to make a few changes, sometimes radical ones, to keep it a perfect ride. That’s what happened with Rick field’s 1963 Panhead FLH.

Rick bought the Pan in 2006 with the intention of making it an everyday rider.

“It was a little beat up and was kick start only, he said. “I made a few changes that worked great for a while, but they eventually lead to having to make some pretty major changes.”

It’s not just nostalgia; the 1960s brought us some really cool stuff, some of it from the other side of the Atlantic.

1969, despite being a year of political and social turmoil, was still part of the decade obsessed with sleek new products and designs. That obsession included motorcycles. Sleek, slim and sexy, that’s one way to catch what was the best British import of the sixties other than the Beatles. The Royal Enfield 750cc Interceptor was the best motorcycle that never dominated American roads.

Let’s face it, if you’re gonna build a motorcycle, you might as well build it the way you want it…to hell with what anyone else thinks.

When Mark Miklos at Maddog’s HD Performance started wrenching on a new bike a couple years ago he knew he wanted a bagger, but he wanted it to have all the balls of a hot rod, too. Not exactly the combination a lot of riders were looking for at the time. So he set to tweaking things to get the result he wanted. The result is a bike that raised the bar for baggers.

Doug Jakel of Morrison, Colorado, does what he’s told.

So in 2009 when his wife told him to “get a hobby and get out of her house a while,” he took her seriously.

In his quest to make his wife happy, ol’ Doug wandered down to 2-Wheelers MC Shop in Denver where he’d seen a particularly intriguing rolling chassis that he figured would keep him busy for a while, thus qualifying as a hobby that would keep him out of the wife’s hair…and keeping the peace.

If only we all could be given such orders….

Sometimes you get an idea in your head and it just won’t go away. So, then you have to make that idea reality any way you can. That’s what happened to Sean Gallagher.

Several years ago Sean threw his leg over a Panhead Bobber somewhere back East, and realized that he liked the way he fit the bike, and the way it looked. He didn’t buy that bike, grew to regret it, and just couldn’t get the vision of his own Panhead Bobber out of his head—a 1940s/50s style Bobber.

Creating a unique motorcycle doesn’t always mean starting from scratch and putting together an over-the-top un-rideable piece of rolling sculpture that’s only good for collecting dust after it’s been shown off a little.

Case in point, this 1961 Panhead.

When you want something done just so, you almost always have to do it yourself. That way, you can take your time and things turn out just the way you want them.

That’s what Anthony Romero thought anyway when he decided it was time for a makeover of his 1998 Harley-Davidson Road King.

Romero, who live in Parker, made the decision to customize the bike himself, so he jumped in with both feet.

Orange and black are, quite naturally, biker colors. They go together, but they don’t always play well with other colors. Nothing rhyme with orange, making it unique, and black is, well, black. Slap them on a motorcycle together and, suddenly, the possibilities are endless.

Keeping that in mind, it’s also pretty natural to take apart the venerable Sportster and customize it. After all, the Sporty is a sport bike of sorts, and lends itself to all kinds of customization—from the radical and extreme, to mild and almost unnoticed to the untrained eye.

There’s nothing quite like a dream coming true. For Sam Hepler of Colorado Springs, it happened twice.

First Sam worked hard to pull together the scratch to buy the right bike, he’d been bikeless and it was time to get back out on the road. When he found the right machine, he jumped on it, a 1995 Electra glide Classic. Like so many of us, Sam wasted little time turning the scooter into the bike he really wanted.

Before long, the classic boasted a thundering 95” motor. Along with it came a high-compression head job, a nasty Crane cam and a Fireball ignition.