Better Beaters - Building Cars and Daily Drivers

Easy Rider. Get your motor running!

Born to be Wild.
Maybe I wasn't, but that didn't stop my dreaming.

This movie connected with me in a special way. It combined my yearning for freedom and adventure with my love of motorcycles. With a splash of youthful rebelliousness.


Especially my love of Harley Davidsons. Though I was happily riding a Honda, I knew that I needed to have an HD to express the degree of my motorcycling commitment. I needed something that would identify me as a real rider. I knew that life changing day would inevitably come.

It doesn't look like a textbook.

It doesn't look like a Bible.

Reading Choppers and Big Bike magazine was where I got my education in Harley Davidson and the hard core biker lifestyle. Easy Riders came along quite a few years later. Their articles and features were written from the view point of the lifer biker, not the poser.

Street Chopper took a more middle class approach to the subject.

It was never about the illegal, drug fueled adventures of Capt. America and Billy, it was the fact that they actually rode`those bikes a very long, long, way. Even if they didn't find what they thought they were looking for.

Even at the beginning, when I first started riding motorcycles, it was always about going somewhere. The further the better. I remember riding my Honda 50 up a hill that was so steep and so long, that it just couldn't go any further. The motor stalled and I was forced to turn it around and go back downhill. I knew that some day, and it would be someday soon, I would have a motorcycle that would be able to crest that hill and deliver me to the Promised Land on the other side.

A year later I had my Honda 160, which was still kind of small, but was big enough to conquer that hill and even venture onto the freeway. Everything was going to be different from now on.

The desire to own one of those custom choppers was shared by multitudes of young American riders who modified their own Hondas and Kawasakis into some semblance of Billy and Captain America's chopped Panheads.

I've posted my experiment with my Honda 305, and later with my Harley Sportster. But it was always about riding. I have modified many of my motorcycles over the years, but it was always with the idea of making them perform better on the road. Cafe racer or dragster type performance was never the goal. On the other hand, a full dress touring bike was never in my sights.  I wanted something that was more like the horse of a wandering cowboy, a faithful mount that could carry me anywhere, without looking like a two wheeled Winnebago.

My fascination with the Harley Davidson became something of an obsession. I was attracted by the mystique of the marque. The history and exclusivity. At this time there weren't any other companies building a big V twin. The Japanese were years away from their initial foray into the V twin cruiser genre. Their initial offering were, to put it mildly, laughable at best. The resurrection of the Indian brand was even further off in the horizon at the time.

To be a real biker, you needed to ride a Harley. As Chris Bunch once wrote "There's nothing wrong with a Triumph that giving it your old lady, and buying a Hog can't fix."

This book was not what I expected.

My longing to experience the freedom of the road was shared by my whole generation. It manifested itself through literature and song.

Robert Pirsig's book is about a lot of things, and well worth reading. Those who have never read it might assume that it explains how riding a motorcycle would transport you into a "Zen like" state of consciousness. You could take that away from it. Riding puts you in the here and now, in the immediacy of the moment. The experience is the whole point.


I have written about my own adventures on the road and how the fire was fueled by the social milieu. It's easy to reference my feelings back to TV shows like "Route 66" and "Then came Bronson." Maybe even "The littlest Hobo." (Now that's an obscure allusion!)

Looking back, it is easy to say that it was all period of romantic delusion. The concept of experiencing real freedom on the road, in the saddle of powerful machine was just an illusion. Maybe it was all just a waste of time, maybe everyone, even myself, were just fooling ourselves. Maybe, but you had to be there to know.

A nice video, but this wasn't made by me. 

We all wanted to live that life. Maybe some of us did.