We also made custom pipes with the old-school bell tips on them. We also changed the rear fender with a ribbed fender on the back and added a custom sissy bar. It’s a 1200 built Sportster with Bill Chambers Racing heads and everything. We gave it fresh rings and pistons and went through the heads and valves. The motor had been run hard during the speed trials. This is the style that I want, but I want you to put your touches on it.” So we tore it completely apart, sandblasted the frame, cut off a bunch of frame tabs, and took the motor apart. T-Rod: One day he came to me and said he wanted a complete frame-up build on this. I named the bike “Chop Suey.” He told me, “I’d like to own it.” I told him, “I really like that 65 GMC you got,” so we traded the bike for the truck. Dave loves motorcycles, and I love building them. T-Rod: It was the love for motorcycles that kind of brought us back together again. We brought it back to basics where it was all about the bike and everything else just evolved around it. We love bikes, we love to ride, and we love to build them. We’re in this for motorcycling and nothing else. The reason we began talking again is because of the bike. After that we started talking and Dave said, “You know what, I really like that bike you have.” The bike opened up a whole new line of communication between us, and we became friends again. It turned into a gnarly bar fight, and we both ended up with a case over it. Dave was on one side and I was on another, and the sides collided. T-Rod: We had an incident over a bar fight. He wanted it for a long time, but Dave and I weren’t talking for a long time. Dave Bermeo always had an eye for this bike. I rode it around for a while and went to the Born Free shows. When I got ahold of it, it needed a front end and wiring. Monkey moved out of state and left it in a storage unit. T-Rod: I got ahold of the bike from a friend of mine named Monkey who owned it for a long time. It was rattle-canned and held together with hose clamps with parts falling off it. Then it went through a transformation when it got put into this ridged frame, but it never really got finished. The previous guys built it and raced El Mirage and actually held a record for a minute in the 1,200 pushrod motor class. It had completely different sheet metal and scheme. It was built for El Mirage, but it had a different frame. T-Rod: The bike originally was a speed trials bike. HB: This bike was originally built as dirt tracker, correct? How did it become a chopper?
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