Editor’s note: The cover of our October 2010 issue featured an elegant-yet-vicious, ruby red ground-up custom built by Dante Depaola out of Northern California. The bike was rather hard to categorize stylistically; a little bit café racer, with some high-end modern sport bike appeal, but with a monstrous 127 cubic inches of gleaming V-twin billet cradled in the center of the frame. What you could easily say about the bike was that it was all attitude, totally badass, and did an excellent job of showing off Dante’s love and appreciation for the California Hot Rod lifestyle. Well, once again Dante has made an offering to the gods of speed and custom culture. However, this time instead of building a bike from scratch, he found his ideal platform in is buddy’s 1994 FXR.

Depending on your perspective, this story starts with either a cream puff or a turd. It ends, however, with a really cool hardtail bobber, no matter who you are. We’ll talk more about the cream puff/turd controversy in a moment. For now, what you really need to know is that this bike was created by Adam Karns from a ’96 Harley Sportster. He’d wanted to cut a Sportster in half and make it a hardtail bobber for years. Adam just never had the opportunity to do so with the other Sportsters that have passed through Karns Kustoms over the years. He finally bought this one just for that reason.

Rarely do form and function meet on a level playing field, but when a person finds a way to blend the two it’s like mixing vanilla with chocolate ice cream—everyone loves it. The combination of the two is appreciated by all because it appeals both to the flashy person that only cares about looks and the guy that only cares about how well it functions. That’s the same rationale behind why so many people feel certain styles embody an entire class and become the standard that every other entry in that class is judged against. Aaron Glenn, owner of Glenndyne Design in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has a motto that he’s quick to deliver, “A design should flow seamlessly and effortlessly across each detail, blending form, function, and genuine style in harmony until it meets a place where everything works perfectly.” And, speaking of function, his latest creation serves two: he wanted a practical bike that he could ride on a regular basis and he wanted to show off some new parts.

There’s the wheel and there’s the reinvention of the wheel. To take something that’s already constructed, let the creative juices flow without boundaries, and flavor it up with your own identity is a beautiful thing. Why eat a ham and cheese sandwich with two slices of Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles when you can spice up the traditional fare with sun-dried tomatoes, prosciutto, buffalo mozzarella, pesto, olive oil/balsamic vinegar, or whatever the hell else your heart desires? That’s the beauty of creativity. This is Roland Sands Designs’ (RSD) modus operandi: building stock bikes into intricate, functional rolling sculptures.

Email your submissions to: Hot.Bike@sorc.com Or snail mail to: HB Reader’s Showcase 1733 Alton Parkway, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92606. Please include hi-res jpegs, your name, hometown, email, phone #, bike year/model, engine size, frame, wheels, sheetmetal, painter, custom accessories, and anything else interesting about your bike.

Describe yourself in three words?
Fun, direct, passionate.

By now everyone’s well aware of the need for a performance tune-up on a fuel-injected Harley. Free-flowing pipes, a performance air filter, high-lift cams, and big-bore kits, they all call for a fuel-delivery and ignition advance remap. Even bone-stock bikes get a huge boost in performance and ridability after some tweaking to the signals the ECM sends out to those injectors. And with all those Power Commanders, FuelPaks, ThunderMaxes, and Twin Tuners out there, everyone knows how that performance tune happens.

After the release of the High-Ball cruiser, the folks at Victory Motorcycles have been pretty busy following that up via a slew of stripped-down motorcycles like the recent Judge and all-new hot-rod bagger, the Hard-Ball. The new touring bike features a bare-bones visual appeal with most of the creature comforts of the Cross touring bikes: large saddlebags, a powerful engine, and well-performing suspension, but with more of an edge thanks to ape-hanger handlebars, an all-black aesthetic with red pinstripes throughout, and pinstriped wire wheels.

Just this once, an intervention happened without a TV doctor and some has-been celebrity making his eleventy-gajillionth failed trip to rehab. There’s no Violent Torpedo of Truth heralding the low-point of an acting career. What you will find is a 2002 Harley Super Glide Sport on the brink of an abyss with a life of shame waiting at the bottom.

The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master.” Darth Vader, Star Wars: A New Hope

Bill York, of Vandalia, Illinois, could be called a Rat Bike aficionado. He’s amassed a vast number of ratted metric bikes, but one bike his collection lacked was an American V-twin. He had always been a fan of the brand (he bought a Fat Boy for his lady-friend a few years back), yet that sole American bike in his garage was the exact opposite of his others (and his lady-friend liked it the way it was). In his effort to complete his rat bike set, Bill went to his rat bike source, Todd Anglani of After Hours Bikes in Florida and created a joint venture to have an American V-twin rat bike built. Together, they worked out the details of what features he wanted this bike to have: tall tires, slammed to the pavement stance, patina as paint, and a hidden talent that would please a crowd.

The customer wants to stay unknown,” Chris Eder told us when we talked to him about this bagger. Misfit Baggers, which is now owned by Pickard USA, built it for a guy in Ireland who wants to remain anonymous. Which is weird because he chose to do so by buying the loudest motorcycle he could find.

Lose weight fast! BOGO! Just a couple of highly effective marketing terms we felt Harley could have easily incorporated into the promotional material for its latest model, the Dyna Switchback.

Email your submissions to: Hot.Bike@sorc.com Or snail mail to: HB Reader’s Showcase 1733 Alton Parkway, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92606. Please include hi-res jpegs, your name, hometown, email, phone #, bike year/model, engine size, frame, wheels, sheetmetal, painter, custom accessories, and anything else interesting about your bike.

Coming from a carburetor or a pair of injectors, a perfectly calibrated fuel mixture won’t provide all the performance it’s capable of if it isn’t lit off at the right time with a big, fat spark. That optimized fuel mixture needs an equally optimized ignition system and pro tuners know it. At Speed’s Performance Plus (SPP) an ignition upgrade is always part of the plan. “It doesn’t take much, either,” says SPP’s Jason Hanson. Maybe some hot new coils, definitely an adjustable control module, quality plug wires, and performance plugs to match, that makes up the parts list. But first come the basics, those common ignition problems that crop up from time to time. “And we see it all,” say the guys at SPP. No doubt, they travel the country tuning literally thousands of bikes a year.

Describe yourself in three words.
Creative, active, everywhere.

When the V-Rod was released 10 years ago, Harley traditionalists scoffed at the idea that the Motor Company had the nerve to break the air-cooled V-twin mold. But after 10 years in production, Harley’s water-cooled V-twin has surpassed the naysayers gripes and the V-Rod 10th Anniversary Edition is testament that the motorcycle is here to stay.

As this issue goes to print, we’re smack dab in the holiday season. It’s a time for giving and being thankful as we shove yet another bite of turducken into our overstuffed pie holes. What it isn’t a time for is pissing off the wife again. We’re looking at you, Bryan Schimke of TPJ Customs. The last time one of his cool creations made it into a bike feature, he or the writer forgot to thank Bryan’s wife, Kelly, and son, Luke, for their patience and understanding during the build. Bryan caught the appropriate hell for that later and in the interest of not repeating that mistake again, he wants everyone to know how grateful he is for the understanding his family showed while he worked on this custom chopper for his good friend, Keith McCoy. Especially since this project was for friendship, and not a cash cow. “With Keith’s bike, he’s a good friend who helps out, so there wasn’t a lot of monetary gain and the family was very understanding,” Bryan says.

So many amazing stories have been brought to light over the decades, chronicling the elusive “barn find” that it would seem nearly impossible that any more could exist. Time has taught us many lessons and none are more prevalent than the fact that history repeats itself. Of course, given enough time, anything is possible, but the story behind this ’42 Harley-Davidson WLC seems hardly able to see a sequel. A genuine barn find makes for a good enough story, but a WWII Harley covered in Honda bits and stashed in a barn in rural Devon, England? Well that just has a nice twist to it.

Working as the sales manager for Killer Creek Harley-Davidson, in Roswell, Georgia, Matt Gibby has seen his fare share of bikes exit the showroom floor only to return a few weeks later for some new chrome and other goodies. So when it came time for his next project bike, he could have easily followed the same path as all his customers and roll the bike into the service bay and let the techs go to town.

There are many aspects of a shop that make it successful, but there’s only one that trumps the rest: performing a service better than the competition. Primer Inc. of Pasadena, Texas, is one of those shops that seems to achieve that number-one trait effortlessly—and with a unique style. Started in 2006 by Pat Kahanek and Jason Barron, “Primer Inc. Customs is dedicated to building unique custom bikes that do not follow any specific trend—we blend vintage looks with modern technology,” Jason says. They prove Jason’s words with every bike they build—this bike for example; it’s their version of a boardtrack racer, but that’s not exactly how it started.

What if there was an American-made cruiser on the market that had the potential to blow every stock Harley cruiser away in terms of performance and value? Would that get your attention? Victory Motorcycle’s Vegas 8-Ball is capable of all that and more.

Sometimes it’s out of necessity, sometimes it’s just wanting more. We’re talking about complete engine rebuilds here, and if that’s what’s in the cards because a tired motor needs major surgery or it’s going to be the next performance step, you might as well go big. Granted, in plenty of instances those top-end kits, the bolt-ons converting an 88-inch Harley to a 97 or boosting a 96-incher up to 106 can be great. But if some is good, more is better, and if the engine’s coming completely apart anyway, a 117, a 124, or even a 131 is going to be significantly more powerful and lots more fun than that big-bore-only motor. Now, this is a major step, it can get pricey, and there are lots of choices and decisions to make along the way. Conferring with an experienced pro is a wise first move. The guys at Speed’s Performance Plus have done plenty of these full-on engine builds, especially during their off-months over the winter, and this kind of experience and insight is worth paying attention to.

Describe yourself in three words.
Passionate, honorable, humorous.

"You owe me a purse!” she exclaimed. Usually when I hear that, it means some drunk just tossed cookies on a stripper or something. This is the first time in the 11 years I’ve been writing bike features someone has ever told me that in relation to a motorcycle, however.