After owning a custom shop for only a few years, Roman Blum had two issues he needed to deal with. The first was that his ever-encouraging wife, Silvia, had seen many bikes come and go, but so far she hadn't been able to get a bike she could call her own. Whenever Roman said he was going to start building her a bike, customer bikes invariably sidetracked him. The second problem was that several parts were sitting around the shop for other projects or customers who never picked them up, and the place was starting to get a little crowded. He decided to kill two birds with one stone and began putting all the leftover parts next to a lift so he could start building a bike for his wife.
He knew two things were going to be important to his wife: She wanted the bike to be comfortable, with a low seat height, and she wanted it to be blue. This left Roman and his team at RB Customs (RBCC) a lot of room to work with. They had an Ultima Softail-type frame without a swingarm at the shop with 34 degrees of rake and a couple inches of stretch in the downtube. Roman had an H-D swingarm lying around that would be perfect for the project, because he knew it would be easier for Silvia to handle a bike with a narrow rear tire.
All Roman has done for the last five years has been ground-up customs, so he's pretty familiar with how the process works. He also knows they are judged by overall stance and how detailed they are. All Roman's bikes look different. He builds everything from bobbers like this to Pro Streets, hot rods, and wide-tire choppers. It was obvious from the beginning that this build was going to be the sort that's done on weekends and nights when he could get away from paying customers' work. The process was slow, but he knew he would need to make several parts by hand, including the air cleaner, exhaust, fender struts, gas tank, oil bag, handlebars, foot controls, taillight, license-plate bracket, intake, jockey-shift setup, and grips. Roman spent many an hour hand-machining all the parts needed, as well as fabricating all the sheetmetal parts. These parts and more are available to the public because Roman manufactures 15 of his own unique parts.