No one’s going to walk past the latest FatBook custom, and that’s a promise… ick Fairless, lead man at Strokers Dallas, head barkeep at Strokers Ice House, party planner extraordinaire, chrome-shop owner, popular “Biker Build-Off” contestant, long-time Drag Specialties dealer and, lately, SPEED Channel TV personality (check all that out starting on page 50) was skeptical. He’d just been approached to build his first-ever FatBook custom and he wasn’t sure the guys at Drag Specialties knew what they were getting themselves into. “My main concern,” Rick remembers, “Was that I wanted to be sure they’d let me build that bike my way. I always thought those FatBook bikes were pretty cool, but I had some ideas all my own. Know what I mean? Well, they said as long as I used FatBook parts I could do just about anything I wanted. I could do it up ‘Fairless style,’ they said. I reminded them that meant a pretty far out paint job, something like they’d never seen before, and they said let’s take a look.”      And Rick showed ‘em. Take a peek at the latest chopper to roll out of Strokers Dallas. It’s an eye-popper, that’s for sure, and the first thing we better talk about is the first thing you see–that paint job. It’s a ‘50’s style theme here, incorporating countless caricatures of that decade. There’s a Wurlitzer jukebox on the side of the oil tank, there are dice, there are eyeballs, there are “greasers” and poodle-skirted girls–all set against a multi-colored pastel background. It’s wild, and when this one goes out on tour there won’t be many people walking past the Drag Specialties tent without stopping to take a good, long look. That paint job, by the way, is the work of Gary Queen at OSC–Other Side Customs, right there in Dallas, just a couple miles down the road from Strokers. “Those guys do 100 percent of our paint,” Rick says. They must love him.

While the paint might be the first thing that stops ‘em in their tracks, anyone looking at this bike will get a full-course FatBook lesson, too. As wild and far out as this Softail chopper looks, and is, every last part of the motorcycle right down to the nuts, bolts and washers holding it together came directly from the Drag Specialties catalog. Now, everyone knew that Rick Fairless would build a chopper, and when he got a look at the new Chopper Guy’s single downtube Softail frame just added to the FatBook the deal was sealed. “I saw some early pictures of that frame,” Rick says, “and I liked what was there. That’s what we wound up going with, and it worked out great. Truth is, I was pretty anxious to work with that frame, too.”      The new frame leads off with a Paughco 36-inch Wide Tapered-Leg Springer and finishes up with a Russ Wernimont 13-inch strutless rear fender. In between there’s an Independent gas tank, a 7-inch Streamline model, some Legend Air chromed suspension, one of TP Engineering’s finest 124-inch motors, polished, and a BAKER RSD 6-speed transmission. And the list of the cool stuff keeps coming. There are Performance Machine bits, GMA parts, Ness, Perewitz, NYC Customs, Accutronix–all the good stuff, and all straight from the FatBook. Paint job aside, this is a bike anyone with access to a Drag Specialties catalog and a telephone could duplicate. Literally.      “We built this bike without doing any major fabrication,” Rick says. That’s saying something. That’s saying this bike truly is a catalog bolt-together. “That was a stipulation right from the start,” Rick explains. “The guys at Drag Specialties might have given us a free hand here, but they knew we generally do quite a bit of special fabrication on the bikes we build. They wanted to be sure that on this one we didn’t do anything more than what a normal guy could do in his own garage. And we didn’t.” So take a good look, like you wouldn’t anyway. Check out the accompanying build sheet, too. It’s all there, and it’s all in the FatBook. Bolt-together customs don’t come much cooler, or easier to build. As for matching that paint, well, you’re on your own there, pal…

Parts Magazine
Volume 12 #7

Parts Magazine Index