Meet, if you will, Cleveland’s“Jesse The Kid”. I was firstintroduced to him during his day of revolting from his Ma. This was a big mistake, as
As the bond grew between Huey,Jeffery, and Jesse and the outstanding skills at PerformanceEngineering/Cleveland Motorcycle Company started paying off for Jesse. The more interest he showed the morethey taught him. Huey’s brilliancewith motors was passed along. The knowledge gained through trial and errorrelated to welding, grinding, assembly, making parts started to evolve in thisbright young man, who became fulltime instead of working just after school.
Jesse’s life around the machineshop/custom motorcycle shop indeed matured him from a kid in and out of thetrouble bag into one extremely talented young man.
He is just that. Kudos to Huey, Jeffery and the crew,who I have close ties with since 1980, for not only passing your wisdom ontoJesse, but also allowing him to discover and develop the gift he has.
Study what he has accomplished here. Huey and Jeffery allowed him to go intotheir respective junk piles from 40 years of building motorcycles and cars.Neither have ever thrown away any item in their lives. So, from two longtime parts collectorsthe young guy assembled what you see, and yes, it is as good a one-off-a-kindpiece as we’ve seen in awhile….in addition, she starts first kick and runs likea raped ape.
The rear wheel weld rim with aMickey Thompson front tire off an abandon car project from the ’80s .
The carb is a 1970s Mikuni Solexthat was used on a Road Rally Datsun. There are no rebuilt parts so new assembly was handled very carefullyand required some hand made parts.
Terry Huntington designed therocker boxes in the late ’70s…Jesse had to do some talking to get our junk guysto come off of these. TheSpringer front end sat in the corner of the shop for 6 years,
so…well, why not. Huey didn’t realize it was missing ‘tilthe bike went to paint.
The front wheel is an early twincam hub laced to a Sportster rim. The brakes are Performance Machine projectbrakes Jesse stole from another machine in the shop. The tranny is a Harley-Davidson Roto-lid, kick only with a6T BMX pedal pulled from Greg’s basement. The shifter is an original Hurst 4-speed shifter donated from theCorvette shop around the corner.
The tank started life as a SuperGlide chopped and channeled. Otherinteresting one-off stuff included the ignition and cam cover. Jesse incorporated them together tocreate the “Mock-neto” a 4-cylinder farm tractor magneto all engineered to workby Jesse.
More one off machined parts ofbillet by Jesse is the forward controls. The belt drive is a mechanical oddity that started out as a worn outKarata set up. Jesse re-machinedthe clutch hub in order to use Twin Cam plates with a diaphragm clutchspring. Another good move relatedto putting the stop on your pants catching in the belt was the machining of thefront pulley cover. This beganlife as a 30 lb block of billet aluminum. With a spare piece of 30 lb billetlaying on the floor and no waste attitude the taillight became a whip up ofsorts and is available on the shop web site Clevelandmotorcycle.com.
Jesse told me “This motorcyclecould not have been made possible without the insight of all those ol’ Timersat Cleveland Motorcycle/Performance Engineering”. I had to laugh out loud at that comment, “Oh really,Jesse.”
The shit they will give thisyoung man when this comes out will rival proverbial Bikers farting around thecampfire night. It will begood-natured in our Biker way, but basically he robbed them of 40 years of junkand 80 years of dues. However,what he did with that junk resulted in the ol’ timers singing him praise,mostly so he can’t hear them. Theygenuinely believe in this young man and maybe won’t admit it, but there is onebig bunch of pride passed along here.
By the way, the power plant is anoutstanding 80-cubic inch Shovelhead with a 10:5:1 Wiseco pistons, S & Slowers dual plugged, ported heads with a Sifton cam.
This almost rivals the stuff HueySchwebs used to build through the ’80s. I photographed motorcycles Huey’s created with motors in them no oneelse on the planet could build. Huey had motors with Panhead, Flathead, Knucklehead and Shovelhead partsmixed and twisted that would out run new stuff on the street. Great to see this wonderful ingenuityis back.
Why not take a machine like thisone and place the “Angel of the Dawn” (her nickname) Amanda, on and aroundit. Fun, gorgeous, great tits
just begins to describeAmanda. Born and reared inKentucky, Debby found her on a ride we were doing through the Appalachian Hillson the
scooters. Deb has an eye for Biker Babes as I’msure you will agree. It neverseems to bother any of us thatAmanda also has great carburetors, fabrication of the hips, lips and ass thatrival any hard belly on the planet. She does not chew tobacco, has all her teeth and hair and scored a “10”on every damn scale throughout the biker world.
Ride hard, damn it!
–Balls
This feature was originally published in Biker Magazine
