  few years back Don Hotop built a little hot-rod Sportster for his wife, and with its heavily massaged Don’s Speed & Custom motor turning the wheel Terena Hotop had no trouble running with the big boys. The only downside was that, outwardly, that road burner looked dead stock. “And were not in the stock-bike business,” Don noted. Terena, he figured, needed a custom to ride around the big events, places like Sturgis. Fly the Hotop colors with some style. She was all for it, too, so long as her bike-building husband didn’t make the new ride too flashy and too much of an attention grabber. She’d do that on-the-road advertising, she just didn’t want everyone pointing as she did it.Well, here’s that bike, finished up just before Sturgis last year. Don made a point of keeping everything right to the minimum, building a bike that would be lightweight and easy to ride. He based it all on a classic chopper frame, a rigid from NYC Choppers mated to a standard-length Paughco front end, another classic. And talking classic, bolted into those frame tubes there’s an S&S Shovelhead, a 93-inch high compression motor. That old-school engine came completely apart, too, so Don could polish and detail every nook and cranny, but we’ll get into that in a minute. That engine, as we’ll see, wasn’t the only part to receive the Hotop touch, a special touch that makes all the difference in the world. Rounding out the parts selection Don chose a simple pair of Drag Specialties laced wheels for the axles, the rear a 5.5-in. model to mount a real-world sized 200-Series Avon. He bent up the handlebar himself, and while he was twisting tubes also made the high-pipe shotgun exhaust with some neat little heat shields. All that got paired with a Headwinds headlight, one of Russ Wernimont’s fenders, some GMA brakes and a full complement of Performance Machine controls, hand and foot. Danny Gray stitched up a cool seat and for a fuel tank Don used an old Sportster piece tunnel-cut to mount lower over the backbone. The oil tank, of course, came with the frame; it’s a “New York Nick” special. Now, about that Hotop touch. The parts recipe here, obviously, reads pretty much like any standard, right-from-the-catalog bike project. But this is no standard, everyday custom. It’s way too smooth and finished for that, and none of it’s accidental, either. Everything, and we mean everything, was subtly reworked and re-machined to one degree or another. “It doesn’t matter where I get something from,” Don says, “I’ll take it completely apart and re-do it. I’ll mill off all the logos and company badges and those cast-in parts numbers. I’ll cut, modify and re-radius control levers to better fit your hands and feet. It’s just taking a standard part and making it mine, and I’m terrible about it. I can’t leave anything alone.” It all makes a big difference, and it takes time. Asked just how long he’ll spend on this custom machining Don just laughs. Suffice it to say that the re-do on those as-delivered parts can take up the lion’s share of hours spent building any bike, and on this one the detail work began at the front fork and ended at the rear wheel. The result, of course, is a bike like none other, a one-of-a-kind build but at the core it all the came right from the FatBook. There’s a lesson there. The aftermarket is a great start, but for a real custom it’s just that, a start. Satisfied with his re-machined creation, Don had Gary Barnes paint the bike black and then Mike Robbins accented it with a little splash of teal and silver pinstriping. Fresh off the worktable Terena’s bobber had less than 50 miles on it before heading to Sturgis. A week later it came back to Fort Madison, Iowa, reading 800-something on the odometer. And yeah, low key or not it made quite a splash up in the Black Hills. People stopped, they pointed and they asked questions. Much to Mrs. Hotop’s dismay. Her below-the-radar custom might be low key but it’s definitely not low-impact. And it’s all in the details. That, and the FatBook. |
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