CHOPPED
Lost & Found TRAGEDY TURNED AROUND AS A 1975 SHOVEL COMES BACK HOME
B
ack in the 1980s this bike was originally built by Kenny Flack, the owner of The Hog Shop, which was a small bike shop in Spring City, Pennsylvania. Kenny specialized in building big motors, and this was a bike that he built for himself. The 1975 Shovel motor is stroked with a set of big-bore cylinders, and the pistons are gas ported to provide a little more compression. The heads were machined, ported, and polished on a flow bench built by Kenny. The motor is sucking in air through a modified super B carb with an accelerator pump off a Holley carb. Then, for a little extra kick, a nitrous bottle strapped to the side. The tranny had gears back cut to stop any slipping out. The frame is a Jammer attached to an early FX front end.
I
normally build clean, kick-only old-school choppers with the heavy metalflake paint that one might call flashy, which resulted in my last build devolving to its very own hater and later named “Cupcake.” When I was invited to Artistry In Iron for the second year in a row in Las Vegas, I wanted to throw a curveball at the competition. I feel like in order to compete in these shows you need to build a Knuckle, Pan, or even a Shovel to get anyone to look. So I did the oppo-
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site and decided to use an S&S 111-inch Evo, Baker six-speed, and a BDL open belt drive to make a ground-pounding badass hell on wheels combination. My friend and I used to hang out at his dad’s repair shop in our teens, and his father had a ’70s metric Pentagram wheel hanging on his wall I was always drawn to. Years later I couldn’t get it out of my head and knew I had to do something about it. After all the smack talk about Cupcake I thought “The Hate Machine” was an ap-
propriate name for the new bike. I chose to keep my head down and let the work do the talking, since that’s really the only thing that matters anyway. After discussing ideas with my friends Ray Tourigny, Chris Moos, and Kevin Babineau, we came down with a solid game plan for the tight deadline build. I own and operate a motorcycle service shop in the small town of Windham, Maine, called Forever Two Wheels. I started FTW in the late summer of 2013
