2007 Cole Foster Custom - A Lesson In Craftsmanship

Cole said he decided to use the Springer frontend because it's little and light.

Things went well for awhile; Cole was designing a kit bike off the original bike, and Custom Chrome was going to add the gas tank from the Blue Bobber to their catalog, but then Custom Chrome went through some internal changes and the kit bike project kind of went south once he got to the roller stage. The bike sat in the back of the Custom Chrome warehouse for several years. Someone found the roller in the back and told Cole he should take it and finish it. "I always have 10 bike ideas rolling around in my head at any given time," Cole said. "I love the early drag bikes, I especially like the fairing style drag bikes like Leo Payne's Turnip Eater and Boris Murray had that twin motor Triumph with a Benelli fairing on it. Some may look at this bike and say 'oh, it's a caf racer,' but this bike has nothing to do with caf style bikes. I just wanted to use that fairing; if you pull the fairing off, you can see it's definitely drag-inspired."

With a span of several years passing between the time he originally built the roller and then wiping off dust that had collected on it, Cole decided to make some changes, like pounding and shaping the fairing, swapping out the mid glide frontend for a Parks Springer frontend, and making new mid controls. The original roller had Cole's signature steel bobber gas tank (now in the Custom Chrome catalog), but he pulled it off and made a similar one out of aluminum. He also made a set of bars, the pipes, and just about everything else on the bike.

So what started out as a potential badass kit bike sat in a dark warehouse collecting spiderwebs for several years, then re-emerged into the hands of its creator. And within three months of after-hours labor, the roller was massaged into a hot little drag-inspired racer with a slight caf touch. As for the decision to leave the bike unpainted, Cole said, "I wanted to leave it raw with a little bit of paint. And since it was all aluminum I was going to polish it to get all the scratches out and then brush finish it. But after quickly polishing it, I thought 'F*#k, that looks pretty good.' I wanted it to look like it was touched by a human and not just stamped out. When you paint something you could do something pretty crude and filler makes it look good, but when it's just shiny aluminum there's no bullsh*t."