Does the thought of partly cloudy skies and lows around 7 degrees above zero sound like the best weather for a nice, long ride? Probably not, but nevertheless these were the climatic conditions in Middleburg, NY, when Bill Moorhead and his friends left for Daytona Beach Bike Week in 2001.
Just like the renowned David Mann painting that illustrates a bike's front wheel in the Florida sun and the rear wheel spinning in the northern snow, Bill and the boys rolled into town for a good time at Bike Week. Unfortunately, there's a dark side to Daytona-in addition to all of the fun, it's also a good place to have your bike stolen. Early in his Daytona Bike Week adventure, Bill walked outside to discover it had all turned bad, and his '99 FXSTB Night Train was nothing but a memory.
They say every dark cloud has a silver lining. The airplane ride home provided Bill with an opportunity to ponder his next bike. Instead of rushing down to his local Harley dealer and buying a motorcycle with 100,000 clones, Bill decided he was going to build his next one. He blames watching the Discovery Channel's Motorcycle Mania and the guy who sells chopper T-shirts at Wal-Mart for infecting him with the fabricating bug. Bill got so enthused that he converted the barn on his 100-acre dairy farm into a fully functional customizing shop.
Building the candy-apple-red bike you see featured here was not an overnight process. For the first three or four years, its Santee rigid frame hung bare from the rafters of the barn. This is not to say that Bill quit riding during that period or wasn't adding to his tool collection. He bought a new Road King and scoured the countryside, looking for additional equipment.
In an old barn not far from his farm, Bill located a 60-year-old planishing hammer. The guy who sold it to him didn't have any notion what the thing was, but Bill had a good idea. Originally, the device was designed to run down the quarter-panels of a car with body damage. Bill modified an existing set of dies and proceeded to teach himself how to make a motorcycle gas tank. Just as his friends had kidded him about the Santee frame remaining bare for so long, he took a razzing for his panel-beating skills. In the middle of Bill's barn floor an impromptu pile of sheetmetal scraps began to rise up like a shrunken Christo sculpture. After blowing through three 4x8-foot sheets of 19-gauge steel, Bill completed his gas tank. Next on the list was the oil tank. By this time Bill had his metal-shaping skills dialed in, and the oil tank with internal oil filter consumed much less time in its creation. All of the welding on Bill's bar-hopper (as he calls it) was done in-house (in-barn?) using a Thermodynamics TIG welder with a hand-held controller.
To handle steering, Bill bent up a set of custom handlebars that mount riserless onto the top triple-tree of a 2-inch-under Perse front-end. Instrumentation is provided by Dakota Digital gauges molded into a pod incorporated within the Arlen Ness-controlled candy-apple-red handlebars. The Perse lower tree features a super-clean bottom-mount headlight from Headwinds and a built-in 3-degree rake.