The first time we saw this bike, we thought, "What the hell is that?!" We're serious; we thought it was under construction. After my initial reaction, though, I began to look at the complexity and detail of every component. After looking around the show for a couple of hours, we kept coming back to this one bike. We can look at stock Harleys for hours, but customs are completely different. We get so involved with details that we almost become intoxicated with how this or that was done that we can lose track of time.
A motorcycle is a basic, simple piece of machinery, right? Originally designed as an affordable mode of travel with better durability than a bicycle, the landscape we know as motorcycle design has been explored, stretched, blended, and reincarnated as "old is new." Lately, most of the bikes seen at shows have been gravitating away from the lean choppers with beach-ball rear tires into shorter, compact bikes with the "less is more" approach. Well, this is true except for the masses that have gained a little girth in the middle, losing some of the padding in the rear, causing the back pain that helps them justify the need for their baggers. But overall, a lot of the bikes coming out lately are re-pops of bikes we have seen in the past. Rarely do we see a bike that makes us stop in our tracks and say, "What the crap?!" Here is a bike that made us do just that.
Christian Dotson created this bike as his very first ground-up custom build. After entering it in a couple of local shows, he had to start making room on his mantle for trophies, as well as getting used to answering the phone constantly. You see, Christian's bike has caused such a stir in the motorcycle industry that it won the honor of being named "America's Most Beautiful Motorcycle" at the Grand National Roadster Show, as well as taking the top prize at the San Francisco Rod, Custom, and Motorcycle Show in 2007. Christian's motivation for building the bike was to showcase his engineering and design talents as well as challenge himself to build something absolutely different from everyone else. Shows be damned, he wanted to build what he knew would be cool.
"For the longest time, it was virtually impossible to find a hot rod/motorcycle shop that really understood proportion, lines, and consistent themes. It was almost equally hard to find designers that could personally fabricate their own vision without any compromise," Christian said. Right away, he exudes a supreme confidence in his abilities to not only design a killer bike, but to build it as well.