Custom Bobber Motorcycles - A Coast To Coast Odyssey

If you haven't noticed, everybody's got Bob lately. Bob's a badass. He takes a punch without flinching. Well, come to think of it, Bob doesn't have an ass. Yeah, instead of a traditional punching bag, Bob's one of those human torsos fashioned from flesh-colored plastic. When we're not wailing on him, venting our spleen after riding in L.A. traffic, Bob wears a leather jacket and sunglasses. Anybody walking in and seeing him for the first time tends to freak out at first sight.

Same thing seems to have happened lately with the "bobber" bike boom, as there's some freakin' confusion as to what a true bobber really is. Seeking the answer, we banged on the shop doors and/or heads of several guys who should be able to clarify the issue. We're using the all-encompassing word "expert" to add clout to our investigation into Bobberland. What we learned is that there's been a blurring of the lines among a "cutdown," a "bobber," and a "chopper," three apparently distinctly different styles of bike. We found out, as the saying goes, that one's man's chopper is another man's bobber-and sometimes vice versa.

Taking the opportunity to gather on-the-spot info, we rode over to the annual Los Angeles-area El Camino Bike Show and Swap Meet, an annual gathering of vintage, classic, and antique bike enthusiasts, where we accosted several of the event's judges to hear their take on bobbers. So what if they were all hunkered around a '28 Harley trying to figure out if the spark-plug wires were the right color-inquiring HOT BIKE minds wanted to know if they knew jack about Bob? Just as the morning's marine-layer overcast started to burn off and the SoCal sun illuminated the dozens of vintage bikes lined up in the bike-show area, we had our first glimpse at a definition from judge Paul Wheeler when he responded to our question: "Got Bob?"

To which he replied, "My pet peeve is that all these guys who have these choppers are calling them bobbers when they've got ape hangers and stuff. They're really choppers, and they got a new name for them as 'bobbers' just because it's popular now." Now, Paul's built a few bobbers himself, as he's been wrenching on bikes since he was 16 (now going on 60). He's been there, bobbed that. He's even got three bobbers currently in the works, two powered by flatheads and one by a panhead. "My first chopper was in '66 right before I went to Vietnam, so I went through stockers, choppers, bobbers, and everything else. It's not hard to tell a pure bobber from a chopper. When you got ape hangers, custom seats, and whitewall tires, it's not a bobber, which is simpler and keeps its original frame, not aftermarket. Now it could be a 'cutdown,' which is another word getting popular again. Cutdowns were around before WWII, while choppers came out afterward when guys starting tossing anything that wasn't necessary for speed and performance, chopping their bikes. The bobbers also cut their fenders so when they rode on the dirt roads they wouldn't get clods of dirt stuck between their fenders and tires."

Our next comments on the subject were offered up by Pat Taylor, a judge for the past five years at the El Camino show. "They either took off or bobbed the rear fender. They cut it down and remounted it; they also either removed the front fender or cut it way down; they kept stock tanks and a stock seat, or they switched for a smaller one from a different-model bike. It was basically a stock bike that they started taking parts off to make lighter so they could race on weekends. They gave themselves a suicide clutch and bought a set of Flanders bars because they were inexpensive at the time. And that's the difference between a stock bike and a bobber. Choppers came in with ape hangers and little coffin tanks and square fenders off a British bike. They were more elaborate and had more fancy chrome that the bobber guys couldn't afford in the old days. To get away from being Joe Citizen, they bobbed their fenders. They wanted to have a different look from the guys back then who rode dressers with their little suits and Good Humor hats and bloused pants and looked like they should have been on a horse. The bobber guys had Levi jackets and rode a dirty bike."

So are people misusing the term "bobber" today? Says Pat, "Oh, I think they are. They even have an '06 Harley they call a 'Street Bobber,' which I think is just a fancy paint job on a bike they already had." (Pat asks, "Please, no letters from Milwaukee.")