Old school is a term people like to toss around, but few are old enough to recall its meaning. Sometimes we all need to be schooled in our biker roots; sometimes it takes a guitar-slinging cook from a small Arizona town to remind us just what is cool.inline_mediumwraptextright31071291/custom/0908_crup_honda_cb_750_chopper0908_crup_01_z+honda_cb_750_chopper+cover_spread.jpgTrue

How much custom do we need? According to the official motorcycle guide, The Biker Codebook: Rules, Style and Ethics, which have I kept tucked neatly somewhere in my head, "Stock is merely a blank canvas for which to splatter chrome, paint and parts to one's personal satisfaction, or until you run completely out of money." The book doesn't mention, however, how much aggravation you should put up with before considering homicide. Let me explain. That would take too long, let me sum up:inline_mediumwraptextright25718939/custom/0910_crup_honda_shadow_project_part_20910_crup_01_z+2006_honda_shadow_aero_vt750+right_side_view.jpgTrue

Custom
I punched my alarm clock in its Mickey Mouse face, sure that would silence its rude ringing. Then I realized it was not my now-dead clock, but the phone.inline_mediumwraptextright25722167/custom/0907_crup_honda_shadow_project0907_crup_02_z+honda_shadow_project+left_view.jpgTrue

Some of the best handbuilt customs in the world not based on a UAM (Universal American Motorcycle ) come out of Europe. The creativity and energy the average European builder puts into their creations is simply mind-boggling. New Motorcycle Cruiser contributor Sabine Welte is based in Germany and on the prowl for the hottest custom iron for the pages of our magazine. As always your feedback on anything in MC is always welcome at cruiser@sorc.com. -BB

You may have caught spy photos of it on the internet forums last year, read about it online, perhaps even dismissed it as some Eurocentric anomaly. But now it's here in the States and it is for sale.

The cameras are rolling inside the vast, underlit workshop of Orange County Choppers in upstate New York. A visitor to this, perhaps the world's best-known custom-motorcycle shop, can't help but get caught up in the lights, cameras and slow-paced action that is American Chopper. Wandering around in search of a restroom I stumble on-camera. To their credit neither Paul Teutul, Sr.-the beefy one with the walrus mustache-nor his son, Paul Jr.-the thoughtful, oft-abused one-cares whether visitors are in on the long-running cable-TV series that's made them the public face of motorcycling in the U.S. and 160 other countries.

Garrison Leykam & Betty-Lynn White
Westport, CT
'03 Yamaha V-Star 1100 Custom
One of the nicest bobbers you'll see, and the engine wasn't even made in the U.S. This bike was created as part of a promotion for a television pilot called Diners. Connecticut Custom Cycles did the work, including the suicide shifter (complete with bloody-eyeball shift knob), Buchanan polished stainless spokes, custom exhaust and modified Burly Bikini Beach bars. Sean Lezotte applied the colorful hues: The airbrushed tanktop, in keeping with the diner theme, depicts a checkerboard floor with a flawless rendition of a classic Wurlitzer jukebox.

In the hinterlands of northern Minnesota winters can be long and unflinching. Days are short, and the choice of outdoor activities on your to-do list dwindles considerably when three feet of the white stuff is piled up for months on end. But after the ice-fishing and snowmobiling options have been exhausted, folks up there still find ways to entertain themselves-especially if they're motorcycle engineers. Case in point: The Axe.

We spied some real horsepower on display at Indy, too, in the form of Sabertooth's new WildCat. Initially dismissed as a wannabe to the monster motorcycle segment, Sabertooth has upped the ante in that class with this performance-oriented bad boy.

We look forward to it every year, but sometimes we're disappointed. The Indianapolis Dealer Show may be the industry's annual showcase for all the latest trick hardware, but this time around the offerings felt underwhelming. Luckily a couple of bikes saved the day for us.

You know your company's slogan is perfect when people not only start repeating it, but living it. So when Star Motorcycles coined the term, "We build it, you make it your own," we figured that many riders would step up and personalize their own Road Star, Roadliner or Raider cruiser to suit their own tastes. And they have. But the message has hit even a more powerful chord as some historically important custom bikes have already been created around Star Motorcycles, taking Best in Show at some of the world's top custom shows. Still others have elevated the Star mission to even greater heights, and you're looking at one of them here.

In today's cruising world, the streets and TV channels are full of custom choppers costing $60K and $80K, with some even topping $100K. The die-hard backyard builder is left with quite a dilemma if his intention is to create a unique metric cruiser that'll command even a smidgeon of attention in this crowded field. Even in rural areas far from biker meccas like Daytona Beach or Hollywood, the streets are literally crawling with tricked-out custom bikes. When I looked into the garage at my bone-stock Honda VTX1800F, I wondered if it would ever look as cool as some of the bikes I had seen on the street (and in the pages of Motorcycle Cruiser). I loved riding the VTX, and it was dead reliable, so I didn't want to do anything to affect that aspect, but I did want to make modifications that'd set it apart from the others.

Got a bike you'd like to flaunt? Send prints or high-resolution digital files (300 dpi, please) of you and/or your cruiser to Motorcycle Cruiser, 6420 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048 or evan.kay@sorc.com.

While catalogs are a great way for a manufacturer to display its products, consumers rarely just stumble upon them in the course of their daily affairs, and instead must actively seek them out. Naturally, aftermarket accessory manufacturers have to find other means to stir up enthusiast interest in their parts. Advertisements help, but due to size constraints are limited to focussing on either brand identity or individual items. Another popular attention-getting technique is hiring a big-name customizer to create a one-off project showcasing the company's components. While these bikes are always exciting to ogle at rallies and in magazines, the reality is that most cruiser owners don't have the time, tools, experience or money to create one of these exotics in their backyard. But that doesn't mean owners don't want to get creative when personalizing their ride. On the contrary, cruiser guys have an almost compulsive need to make their bikes their own.

Sometimes you go looking for a great feature motorcycle, and sometimes, as in the case of Armand Beaupre's classic 1970 Honda CB750 Four chopper, one finds you just standing by the roadside.

From its inception, our Kawasaki Vulcan 2000 project would include two stages. In the first, we'd take a competent motorcycle and make it better—more what we would have wanted it to be from the factory. In the second, we would hand off our newly gussied-up cruiser to a customizer to show us all how real builders do things.

When people actually think about custom cruisers, they generally imagine either the builder/artist following a vision of what he thinks the bike should be or the builder following the ideas of a client who has the vision but not the skills to bring it to reality. Most people, however, don't realize there is a third route to owning your dream custom. When Bonnie Pfiester decided she'd gone as far as she could go with dressing up her Vulcan, she set out to decide exactly what features she wanted on her ideal cruiser. She began by buying every motorcycle magazine she could find to research what styles appealed to her. Next, she went to tons of bike shows armed with a camera. Once she had gathered all this information, she sat down and studied her favorite modifications.