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Your Location: Home, Cool Customs, Head Trip Head Trip
-- story by American Choppers ) Head TripGood things come to those who wait...for a while "This bike's been in my head for quite a while, and so finally I had to build it," Steve Schaeffer explains the raison d'etre for this black beauty. "I kind of started with the frame and the points and built off that in terms of carrying it through with all the foot controls and grips and some of the other details that are on the frame. And it just evolved as I built it." Although the bike looks extremely clean, as if built by a group of seasoned pros in a well-equipped shop, Steve swears he did the whole thing in his garage, in which he's got not much more than a small lathe, a welder, an air compressor, and a set of hand tools. The obsession with the details, he admits, stems from his days as owner of an antique car restoration business. "It took me eight months," he says, "although most of that time was spent waiting for parts. The motor alone took like five or six months to get here." Steve, who earns his living by running the service department of an independent bike shop in the Chicago area, has also built several bikes over the past 15 years, some for friends, some for himself. He approached this ground-up build the same way he used to approach the restoration of an antique car. "Details are something I pride myself on," he says. "I enjoy making things fit just perfectly, so they look like they belong and not like they just got bolted on."
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Accordingly, this bike is extremely clean, with not a bolt, hose or cable out of place. "At some point, things have to come to termination, and if termination is out in the open, there isn't much you can do about it," he says.
Steve also made the seat pan, handlebars, pipes, axle covers, oil tank, and a whole bunch more. "Those foot pegs! Cripes, I probably spent two weeks hand-filing and grinding and tweaking them, before I even sent them out to get chromed. It's truly a labor of love."
He modified the Chicago Chopper Works frame by molding everything and adding some accents such as the points here and there and even what his friends refer to as the "limp dick" between the down tubes.
"I didn't even realize that's what it looks like until I was done with it," he laughs. "I knew it needed something in that area 'cause it was just too open, and it just happened to end up looking like this. I was gonna have the girl that pinstriped it add some red, so it would look like I hit something with it, but she said she didn't think it needed it."
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