It's not as rare as it used to be to stumble across a bike built from the ground up by someone in a garage; on the other hand, it's a rare occurrence to find a bike that is the owner's second custom motorcycle build, was built in a garage, and was completely hand-fabricated.
This is exactly what Peter "Herby" Herbert has done with "The Purple People Eater." It's a funny name, but give the guy a break-he's from Europe. At 14 Peter started studying under his uncle, a master metal fabricator from Germany, not just doing gas tanks for motorcycles, but fabricating entire fenders and other hard-to-find parts for Porsches and Mercedes.
Peter was fascinated by metal fabrication and mechanics at an early age and pursued a career as an auto mechanic, but he always fed his creative side with various projects. He finished a '68 shovelhead, his first motorcycle project, more than 15 years ago, taking the knowledge he had acquired about metal fabrication and adapting it to motorcycles and motorcycle parts.
He began learning about motorcycle builders and became friends with well-known German builder Fred Kodlin. After seeing some of the custom ground-up motorcycles that were churned out in the late '90s, Peter knew he wanted to do one of his own. He began building The Purple People Eater in early 2000 in Germany.
He knew it would take some time, but over the years he had invested in all the tooling he would need to make the bike. Peter doesn't believe in Bondo or any sort of body filler, so what you see is what you get with this one-of-a-kind machine. The frame was the first piece of business to take care of; he fabricated an adjustable jig and began to make his dream a reality. He knew he wanted a lot of rake and a long, lean look, so he settled for 47 degrees with 6 inches of stretch in the backbone. The metal had to have several intricate bends in order for the motorcycle to handle properly, and, to throw another wrench into the design, Peter decided to make the bike a Softail. He had to make sure his sculpted bike was ridable, so he measured everything several times to ensure proper clearances and quality handling characteristics.
Because mistakes can easily be seen where two pieces of metal join together, several points on the bike required exceptional metalworking ability. Peter looked for components that would match the way he thought a ground-up, sculpted motorcycle should look. He wanted to source as many parts as possible from Germany because he liked the sleek European lines people were coming up with there.