ead out to your favorite Sunday riding spot and start talking about well-known bike builders and the first name off everyone’s tongue is not going to be Roger Goldammer. In fact, many of you may be saying “Roger who…” right now. But if you have been tied to the motorcycle industry for the last decade and you push your brain cells hard, the name will connect to something for you.
     First seen on the pages of some big custom v-twin magazines, Goldammer, who calls Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada home, made quite a stir with his one-piece billet fork assembly. The entire top section of the fork including the top and bottom triple tree and the upper half of the fork tube was all machined from one chunk of billet. Not something you saw every day then, or even now. But everyone had to have one–but they couldn’t. Roger machined them as he could, but not with a desire to get so many on the market that they became commonplace.
     As the author of this story, I (Howard Kelly) have a long-standing friendship with Goldammer and as we were doing this interview he said to me, “I suck at business, I am smart enough to make money, but I just don’t want to do it. I manufacture just enough parts to afford the freedom to build what I want to build.” And it is true, the more people wanted his parts, the less he built, almost disappearing from the motorcycle industry for a while.
     Goldammer got his start as a machinist in an automotive shop. For eight years he fabricated pieces for vintage restorations or high-end custom cars. That led him into engine building at the shop, which gave him the well-rounded background necessary to really build a motorcycle. Says Roger, “Many people in the industry these days skipped this step, paying your dues and learning what you can, but with the manufactured parts available you can probably get away with it more than I could have when I started building bikes. But then again, you can’t really subcontract art, can you?”
     A long time dirt-bike fanatic, Goldammer has recently taken up with the idea of making really cool bikes out of singles, but not like a Honda 650 single or something. No, Roger has been taking the rear cylinder off of a big-twin and depositing a blower or supercharger in its place–along with creating his own fuel injection system, adding staged nitrous and trying to figure out how to make it all work together smoothly. Because building show-winning v-twin-powered bikes in the AMD World Championship isn’t a challenge enough.
     His most recent bike, built to be raced at the great white dyno known as the Bonneville Salt Flats and then shown in the AMD World Championship, has completed the first portion of his goal. Goldammer made a run of 145mph down the salt without the nitrous–and decided to back it up with a full-on nitrous run coming back. After an almost disastrous false neutral, he spooled it back up and used all the nitrous he had to come back the other way at just over 165mph–giving him a 155mph average with a single.


Roger Goldammer’s latest creation was purpose-built to be raced on the Bonneville Salt Flats and also shown in the AMD World Championship.

     Each bike Goldammer builds is to his specifications and his liking. He doesn’t plan to build a bike for anyone but himself. Sure a customer can come in and ask for a bike to be built and provide some guidelines, but he has to trust that Roger understands what he wants and let the man build. Otherwise Roger will not do the project and will go on and build the bike he wants to build. He takes each bike on as a challenge to himself, essentially viewing each creation as a prototype. If there is something, a design, a part or a new way to engineer something that can have some limited commercial appeal, great, but it is not the reason he builds the bike. A bike gets built when Roger is curious if something can be done. When the craze of adding a single sided swingarm from a sportbike or carving one out of a huge chuck of billet was running through the custom world, Goldammer wondered if it could be done to look more like a conventional tube frame–it can. When he was asked to be on the famous Biker Build Off TV show, rather than conform, he built a bike around two, 250cc two-stroke go-kart engines, because he was curious if it would work–it does.
     When asked about the future of the custom bike industry, Goldammer was a little hesitant at first, but after some prompting he said, “Well, I think the custom chopper with everything on it is done, which, to me, is a good thing because I think people want to go riding again and will switch to sleek, nimble fun-to-ride bikes again. Take my next idea for example, it’s going to have one of those new S&S P-Series engines–but it will be fuel injected with a blower…” We can’t wait to see it.