Gunslinger Custom Bikes

One of our owners wanted to update his bike this year and we've done maybe two or three designs for him in the past. When we found out were going to get the owner's bike it was really exciting but there's also a lot of concern too because we're into in production and all of a sudden here comes a one off custom. So once Dave approached me and we kind of went through and gave him three, four designs. Really we wanted to give him a fresh new look and he was looking for something that was lean and clean, give it a lot of length to it. I was pretty excited when I heard that Dave wanted us to build him a new tank and he had somewhat of a design that he wanted us to carry on. It's all completely handmade and it's originally it started out as a full p And then He was looking for candy red which is one of his favorite colors of course and then the dark bottom kind of He wanted something with a little more style and a little more pizzazz to it. So we told him in the art director we decided what kind of stripes we want, the thickness of the stripes, the colors of the stripes. On Dave's bike we had three different stripes all tied together very, very tight. In fact the stripes were 16th of an inch and that was the whole bike throughout. It's kind of rare usually they're not that thin but on this one that's what they called for and it came out really nice. Dave's bike was across the street getting painted so Dave had talked about building the motor. I was really excited about it because I kind of had a feeling that he was just going to let me do whatever I wanted so I told him what kind of bike I wanted to build him and he said you're going to be rideable and I said yeah getting after it will be rideable it will be a good time and he said well do it. So first thing we did was sent the heads out to get poured and polished and bigger valves and everything Got the cylinders board over, 10 over and then I sent everything down in Nevada to get diamond cut. I was So I wanted a bike that sounded kind of meaner than it was I guess because I wanted to stay reliable because the last thing I needed is Dave calling me from the side of the road. So I went with a little lower rift cam. I still used a pretty good amount of duration to give it that they made good power, ended up changing out the intake valves, 212 intakes, beehive springs so we could run just a lot easier on a whole drivetrain. When you run a lower lift like that you don't need to run dual springs because it just kind of beats everything up I mean the springs are light, the beehives they're dual rate. I didn't want to port and polish the throttle body because I didn't want to run a bigger throttle body because it would have already taken some of the runability out of the bottom end that's got now but that happens when you use big valves, big ports. Things suffer a little bit in the bottom so I kept that stock size so we could still get some runability out of it but at the end of the day it came out with 124 lbs of torque and 114 horse so it's a runner and it comes on about 3 grand and it pulls. We ordered a 23 inch wheel and a fender to fit that wheel and Dave Call kind of wanted something that was similar to fenders we'd built in the past so he came in, we drew it out on the fender, on the bike and just cut it out a little bit at a time to get it just perfect for him. It brings out the front of the wheel really well and then the back it just creates a line flowing throughout the entire bike. We had some vents cut out in the side covers and put in some stainless steel mesh grille and then I wrapped a red LED around it and then we attached it to the accessory plug-in on the bike so you don't even know it's there you just flip a switch and you have red lights shining out of the side. And then it goes on to the next step whether it'second, third colors, airbrushing, shadowing, or dropshadows, whatever you need. The art director is completely involved most of the time with all one off custom stuff. There's added steps of clear and then the polishing is done in a different manner to where it's completely flat, sanded, re-cleared and then polished. You'll cue see the entire bike, all the pieces and then once that's done it'll go into a clear lockdown. It's a polyurethane clear, it's high solids clear, it's built for having to stand it and get a lot of the edge knocked off of it and we polished the entire bike and then it has that show bike finish.