The Bike Headed to Mama Tried Motorcycle Show

All right. Hey, it's Kevin Bass here. Vintage bike addiction. I'm here to fix my hog today. Taking a look at my 1957 Panhead. It's actually my son's Panhead. He's got it now, which is kind of cool. There's a big story to that we're gonna talk about, but we're gonna take a look at this bike and explain a few things about it, talk about the history. But also, um, show that a bike like this is gonna be going to a big show called Mama Tried, if you're not familiar with mama tried bike show, look it up, Mama tr.com on a bike show on social media. One of the biggest coolest, uh, motorcycle shows in the country. It's held downtown historic, uh Milwaukee Wisconsin. It's one that you don't want to miss this bike was picked to be in the show this year. And that's what's kind of different about this type of a show is that they hand pick the bikes they wanna have in the show on display. So not just everybody gets in, you know, I mean, and they go through thousands and thousands of events and they hand pick bikes for unique reasons. You know, there's a lot of bikes that people build that are all cool. But they want to hear about a story and see about cool things. This one's got a really cool story because I'm a high school shop teacher. I started doing motorcycles with my students back in the early two thousands. And this was the first panhead that I did with my kids in class and this bike has been all over the country. It's been in magazines across the nation and it was gone for a while. I had to sell it, trade it off, buddies, had it and it came back and now it belongs to my son. So there's a really cool history on this bike, the soul, this bike has, it's changed the look many, many times through its lifetime. Um I even wrote a book back in 2006 about it. Uh highlighted the whole build from start to finish. Uh You can see it looks a little different than from what it does now, but there's some similarities and we're gonna actually gonna go through this bike and we're gonna do some changes before we take it to Mama Tr uh and kind of make it look more close to how it used to be when it was first built. So starting at the backside of here, um we have just a hard tail frame, so no swing arm on this style bike. It's just a rigid frame. Um hence on this style, now there's some springs in the seat originally when it was built, uh I had a seat pan that just sat directly right on the frame rails. So no suspension at all, which uh is a little bit tough on the kidneys in the back. But, uh, you know, when you're young, you think that you're uh feel no and go for it. Um As the years progress, you know, you add springs, you do different things, but we're gonna go back to this style seat for the show just to kind of show the his uh nostalgia of it. And the history, uh this seat was actually made by Paul Cox. Uh If anybody's familiar with Paul Cox, he's one of the uh top leather tooling seat makers in the country. Uh He was partnered with Indian Larry and the Indian Larry Legacy motorcycles. So cool piece there gonna get that back on um, with an old panhead like this. Normally, it would have been uh uh a mechanical style drum brake. This one here has got a little bit more new technology or it was more with a hydraulic rear brake for a little bit better stopping power with the rotor rather than the drum, which is cool. Uh The rear fender was just an old trailer fender that we modified. You can see that we drew up some spider web gussets, little brass knuckles on the back, kind of give it a little bit of a custom flair to it. Uh, looking at the exhaust. That's one of the things we're gonna change up. This used to have a little better exhaust two and a one and, uh, had a little performance to it as you can see. Now, the bike's been kind of cut and chopped and, and modified and these exhaust pipes are sort of, uh, looks like just kind of an afterthought that happened And we're gonna go through that and redo it and make it look nice. So it runs good, sounds good, performs well. Uh You got the old four speed kicker cover, uh the old Harleys like that and this one's gonna be a jockey shift four speed and we got some mid controls on this one where normally you'd have some from uh Ford controls to run all that does have a Magneto. So no battery in this bike runs right off the Magneto for its spat. Uh Sns Car Bonnet, a Spartan Springer, uh riveted sprinter up front, which is kind of cool. The 21 inch Spoolie. So this bike here really, it does mean a lot to me. It uh it has a good personal connection because it's the first pan and ever built first bike I did with my students to really get the chopper class going. Uh It was in my book and this bike is, has changed hands and travel a lot in its lifetime. Um Initially when I built it. I never planned on selling it. But as you know, things happen, life changes, you have kids. I had to get rid of it. Help. Uh uh you know, get our family in a better place. Uh this property here and I went to a good friend of mine, Joshua met uh and he had it for a number of years and then we had uh another friend Jason Mao in town filmed some Harley videos. He ended up buying a bike, took it to California the last couple of years and just sent it back down here, this man and gave it to my son for his 19th birthday as a gift. So pretty cool. A lot of history on this, a lot of sentimental value to me. It's really cool to see that the bike came back home and it's gonna be something that my son's gonna be able to ride and I'm gonna be able to enjoy riding next to him, seeing him on it. And I'll be remembering all the stories I had on and all the trips I took on it. And hopefully he's gonna make the same memories and maybe this will go to my, one of my grandkids or his son someday. So, a lot of cool things with this bike, a lot of history, a lot of soul, a lot of heart