The team had a couple of fenders from Fat Katz they were planning on using, and fabricated custom fender brackets with crown shapes to top them off. They knew they wanted to use Legend Air Ride suspension in the rear, but wanted to come up with something cool, and wanted the bike to look like a rigid.
They began by mounting the fender to the swingarm and fabricating a skirt to hide the Air Ride pivot, so it would be impossible to tell if the bike had suspension. They then realized it would look cool if they put the seat down in a cavity that would rise and fall with the suspension. Instead of having a seat mounted to the fender, it's mounted to the frame. Now when the Air Ride is engaged, the seat rises up from its cavity, but when the suspension is disengaged, the seat sinks back down.
At the time it seemed like everyone was using forward controls on builds, and the guys had to be different, not to mention the fact that most were too short to reach forward controls, so they threw on some mid controls and called it good.
For the finishing touches and to really make the bike stand out, they decided to gold plate the triple trees, primary, pushrod covers, and rocker boxes, and sent the rest out to Ernie Ball for a smooth candy red finish.
Rod and the Xtreme crew were pretty happy with the results. Their inspiration took them in a new direction and allowed them to create an original one-off bike. They brought the bike down to Myrtle Beach for the rally to showcase the Venus wheels, and Bo Puckett from North Carolina stopped by and decided he had to have it.
The Xtreme Machine crew will probably build another bike in the future, but have no plans to do so yet. They will most likely end up waiting for some kind of inspiration.