The name on the sign says it all. Thunder Cycles start right here.

From the Discovery Channel to you...

ddie Trotta is on a roll. Undefeated in the Discovery Channel’s “Biker Build-Off” competitions, it’s obvious this guy knows how to build a bike. He knows how to turn that passion into a successful business, too. Since its inception Thunder Cycle Design has grown by leaps and bounds. Right now Eddie is in the process of moving into a 30,000 square foot facility in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He’s bringing his showroom, his sales department, the fabrication shop, the paint booth, the detail and graphics room, the full CNC machine shop, the pipe-bending equipment, the motorcycle assembly and service racks and the packing and shipping departments all under one roof. And while the sheet-rock guys and the electricians and the plumbers and painters and carpenters all work furiously to put the new building into shape Eddie and the guys and girls at Thunder Cycle continue working right around them. Thunder Cycle Design isn’t missing a beat. New bikes go together every day, completed bikes are serviced. And all those trick Thunder Cycle parts–the taillights and pegs and air cleaners and velocity stacks and pulley covers and belt guards, with more than 50 different TCD parts now in the FatBook–continue to be produced non-stop. Thunder Cycle Design is on the move, both literally and figuratively.
     All this is a long way from New Haven, Connecticut, where as a 13-year-old kid Eddie Trotta would spend just about every waking moment with a wrench in his hand. Motorcycles were a first love, and he began by helping his older brother tend to the many bikes that rotated through the family garage. There were Knuckleheads, Flatheads, even a couple vintage three-wheel Servicars. “Whenever my brother would turn his back or go into the house for a minute I’d fire one of those things up and take it for a ride, too,” Eddie remembers. All that was the beginning of a really good education and before long he was building bikes professionally, working at a local shop named Choppers East. Barely out of his teens, Eddie Trotta learned how to build a complete motorcycle, “doing it the right way.” But Trotta’s story is hardly a straight-line progression from that Connecticut bike shop to Florida and the mega-business known as Thunder Cycle Design.
     Besides motorcycles Trotta grew up with another passion–music. And it was that music, in a roundabout way, that brought him to Florida and the motorcycle fame he enjoys today. While working at Choppers East Eddie was also attending the prestigious Berklee College Of Music in Boston, studying piano, drums and guitar. He was good at it, too, and still keeps instruments all around the house. “But one year during Spring Break, like so many college kids, I came to Fort Lauderdale,” he says, “I never left.” That was 30 years ago.

Eddie Trotta just moved into a new 30,000 square-foot facility. The entire Thunder Cycle operation–from the showroom to the fabrication and machine shops to the paint booth and detail room–is now under the same roof at 550 W. Sunrise Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, FL.

The new showroom covers almost as much space as the entire building Thunder Cycle moved from. A steady stream of customers and dreamers keep this a busy place.

     It wasn’t music or motorcycles that kept him in the Sunshine State, though, even though he’d brought a couple customs with him, a Shovelhead and a Panhead. It was horsepower of the original kind. Eddie had relatives in the area, an aunt and uncle, and as it happened his uncle was a horse trainer at Hialeah and Gulfstream. “I started going to the track with him,” Eddie says, “and immediately I liked what I saw.” Apparently so, because he spent the next 18 years there. Progressing from being an assistant trainer to his uncle, to a trainer in his own right, to a racehorse owner, Eddie was soon buying and selling racehorses at a fast clip. He started with a $3,000 horse that won some money and used those winnings to buy better horses that won more money. “Before I knew it I had 30 horses in the barn,” he says.
     In the late-‘70s Eddie shifted course again. He took his racing from the turf to the surf and began seriously running a few offshore powerboats. He even won the prestigious Bacardi-sponsored Miami To The Bahamas race one year. All that evolved into the opening of a rigging shop where he’d design and outfit Cigarette and Catamaran racing hulls for himself and a few select customers. Eddie had enough machinery and equipment in that rigging shop to build some pretty nice motorcycles, too, and during those years he’d put together a new custom bike for himself pretty much on an annual basis. Those machines would serve a pivotal role in the next venture. Seeing the world of off-shore racing change into “just a handful of rich guys racing only each other for nothing” Eddie tried his hand at a new line of business and opened a couple of bars and restaurants in Miami. Prophetically, he named one of those new nightspots the Thunder Road Saloon, trading on the biker-bar craze then taking hold. It was the early-‘90s, “And all those Harley-Davidson cafes had just opened,” Eddie explains. “The custom Softail thing was starting to happen and bikes were getting pretty hot. It all made sense.” To decorate the saloon and set the tone Eddie put together a couple of pretty special customs to hang from the rafters, bikes nice enough to end up featured on magazine covers. One went on Easyriders, another showed up on the cover of VQ. That exposure, coupled with a steady line of bar and restaurant patrons liking what they saw hanging from the ceiling and asking if they could get something like it for themselves had Trotta “off and running in another new business.” Thunder Cycle Design was finally born.
     At first Eddie worked from a small warehouse on a Fort Lauderdale back street. In a tragic turn it all almost ended before it started. Eddie was just wrapping up his bar/restaurant businesses and opening the doors to Thunder Cycle Design when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. A year later, with that under control, he was told he now had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and if all that wasn’t enough he’d contracted skin cancer, too. With each setback Eddie was down for about a year, “And with all the chemo and other therapy I lost my hair, felt like hell and looked like Freddie Kruger,” he says. But none of that slowed him down. In three years Eddie had moved four times as Thunder Cycle Design grew, and then grew some more. At first it was just Eddie and one other guy, John Jolley, doing everything. John is the head machinist at Thunder Cycle Design to this day, but back then Eddie and John would build what he calls “mini choppers, bikes with 4-, maybe 6-inches of stretch, and people would look at us like we were crazy. People told us choppers were history, out of style.” Obviously they were wrong, and Thunder Cycle Design had the customers at the door to prove it. “And right from the start,” Eddie says, “I was doing things like strutless rear fenders and trying my best to make a Softail chopper look like a rigid.”

Every Thunder Cycle is an Eddie Trotta creation, from the frame design to the pegs and grips and velocity stacks they’ll eventually get. A new rigid with its molded tank and fender takes shape.

A man in his element. As demanding as the business gets, Eddie is happiest back in the shop. Another “Thunder Cycle” nears completion.

Neat as a pin and everything in place. Thunder Cycle’s new shipping department was just days old when this photo was taken. A whole assortment of Thunder Cycle Design parts will work their way through these shelves and into the FatBook.


     Today Thunder Cycle Design hums along with a crew of almost 20. “I keep my hand in all of it, too,” Eddie says. Besides overseeing everything that happens and calling the shots in every department, Eddie does all the prototype work on the new frames and brackets and pegs and grips and everything else that carries the TCD logo. There are now something like 400 separate parts in that list, too, everything from grips and pegs, to belt drive units, to primary shrouds and pulley covers, to wheels, license plate frames, and velocity stacks in all sizes and styles. And now a good portion of all that is distributed through Drag Specialties, making the motorcycle magic that’s Thunder Cycle Design available to everyone, everywhere. More of those very special and award winning TCD parts are being added to the FatBook all the time, too. About a year ago Eddie received a manufacturer’s license to make the purchase of complete Thunder Cycle bikes a whole lot easier, as well. Every custom rolling out of this shop now carries a 17-digit VIN tag. Eddie’s “Thunder Cycles” are in the NADA retail book, and they can be financed. All those bikes are built right in Fort Lauderdale, too. “The only part of any build we send out,” Eddie says, “is the chrome plating and the upholstery.”
     You don’t need one of those complete bikes to get the genuine Eddie Trotta Thunder Cycle Design style, though. Just open the FatBook, it’s right there and there’s a lot more to come. Count on that, and count on Drag Specialties to get it all to you.