| Motorcycles and Twowheelers: Motorcycle hobby and interest - "Want a chopper? Build your own!" Wednesday, 20 August, 2008 | Home | Suggest a Link |
Formula 1 Fantasy LeagueMotorcycle chopper kits are a growth industry. But what does that mean to you and me? Well, one thing that we know is that we will have more choppers to ogle at. There is not a single day that goes by without more and more pictures of chopper bikes that have just been finished showing up in all the motorcycle magazines. Then at the weekends, when we are on our “hot” rides, we will see four or five show finish level bikes. There are more choppers around now than there have been in the last twenty five years.
Most of these choppers have been built from motorcycle chopper kits, the “bike in a box” approach. But hey, don’t knock it! Building your own chopper has never been easier. There are rolling chassis kits, complete bike kits, and frame manufacturers give you a multitude of choice when it comes to take the plunge and buy a motorcycle chopper kit.
Thirty years ago, the old school chopper builders had to start with a stock bike off-the-shelf and literally chop it to pieces. With the modern chopper kits, there is a viable alternative to taking the cutting torch to your favorite softtail!
Nowadays, you have a cheap and easier way to build the bike from the ground up. When you take the cost of buying a new bike and the expense of chopping it, it works out much cheaper to start from step one, and your chopper kit. Instead of tossing away the parts that you'll never use again, you can start building your own bike with the parts that you really need. All the parts are included in the motorcycle chopper kit, along with comprehensive instructions.
One of the first questions that people ask when considering buying a kit is, how will my bike stand out from all the other chopper kits? Well, think of it this way: you are going to buy a chopper kit. A pile of unassembled raw metal. No paint, no real finish, just a blank canvas. Is your taste in paint jobs likely to be the same as the next guy, who buys the very same kit? I don't think so. What about your taste in bolt-ons, seats, exhausts? Just because you buy the kit doesn’t mean every little thing has to be just so. That is the whole point isn’t it? It's very easy in this way to build your own custom chopper from a chopper kit.
Another big question is, “How long”? The answer to that is as long as it takes. Even on the kit bikes, which are supposed to be designed to fit together like a glove, you are going to run into some snags. It can’t be avoided!
If you want a more concrete guide, try this. An experienced kit builder (though not a professional) I spoke to reckons it took 10 full days to build his last chopper from a kit. For someone less experienced it could take a couple of days longer. Twelve 9 hour days works out at 108 hours. Over evenings and weekends, this could drag out to three or four weeks of living in a pile of motorcycle parts! So be prepared to literally 'live the experience' if you are going to take the plunge.
What about the practical side? Well, there is no substitute for experience. The place to start building up your experience with the mechanical side of building a kit bike is with your current ride. Make sure you can do all the basic maintenance on your motorcycle, and then start to do some simple disassembling. Take off the tires, take off the exhaust, real basic stuff. All of this will help to build a new confidence in the shop side of things. You can also get some great videos on maintenance, and even on building the custom bike of your dreams. Read the books, watch the videos, and buy the t-shirt! Believe me, all the preparation you make will stand you in good stead.
If you really are hopeless at the mechanical side of things, why not pay someone else to help you build it, or even get them to build the whole thing for you? The cost of the kit plus labor could well work out cheaper than buying a chopper “off the shelf”.
And of course, when that beautiful chopper is standing on your driveway, and your friends are asking you “Was it worth it?” you can turn to the chopper, drag your hand across the flames on the tank and the polished chrome, turn back to them and say, “What do you think?”
The latest craze worldwide is purchasing and racing Pocket Bikes.
However, these can be very dangerous to the inexperienced rider. These bikes are not toys and should never be underestimated.
The bikes that are more powerful and expensive are strictly built for experienced adult riders, not children looking for a joyride. These bikes are built sleek and fast for racing. They have power of 9.5 hp or 12+ hp - these models are definitely suggested for professional racers only.
Due to the incredible power to weight ratio, if you have no previous experience with these bikes, take safety precautions and educate
Read this article in full
One of the key parts of motorcycling is making your ride unique to your taste. Motorcycling is all about the shared passion and individual style. Motorcycle customization has become big business driven by this need to take a showroom stock motorcycle and "pimp" it out if you will. The demand for aftermarket parts has created a huge startup with ma and pa stores. Small time fabricators are designing custom pieces for their favorite motorcycles and offering them to the masses.
This is not to say that the major motorcycle corporations have
not taken notice. Honda offers their very popular VTX motorcycle
models in 13 different customization styles. You can mix
Read this article in full
Choosing the parts that your custom chopper will be made of can be very confusing, considering the large numbers of custom chopper bike kits available on the market today. Chopper innovators like Biker’s Choice, Phantom Cycle, Paul Yaffe and many more sell chopper-in-a-box kits available for chopper enthusiasts. Thanks to these kits, custom choppers have become quite affordable and are no longer necessarily toys for millionaires or master mechanics.
Custom chopper kits provide the future chopper owner with all the instructions and just about every component necessary to create a perfect chopper of ones dreams. Jesse James, famous for his
Read this article in full
With bike week just around the corner, bikers from all over the country are pulling their motorcycles out of winter storage and cleaning up their leathers in anticipation of a motorcycle rally like no other. While Daytona is definitely the place to be the week of March 5th, Florida offers some great stretches of road through pristine landscapes to some great biker destinations.
About an hour and a half north of Daytona on A1A lies the bustling beach community of Jacksonville Beach, which is where we will meet for the start of our road trip- because, well, that's where I'm
Read this article in full
Weeks before I'm ready to leave on a long motorcycle trip, I start getting excited. Often I get to the point where I can't think of anything else.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that I spend the time getting prepared for it. I usually put this off to the very end. I've learned, however, over the years that this means that my packing never matches what I will really need for the trip. Proof: last year I was in Sturgis with nothing more than a sweatshirt and leather vest riding around in 45 to 55 degree weather. DUMB MOVE.
Anyway, to
Read this article in full
 |  |  |  |  |
