Franky’s ’05 Dyna Fix

A wild project, the 23-year-old tattoo artist said he lost control of his
’05 Dyna and went down on a slippery street in trendy West Los Angeles. He wasn’t injured much, but his girlfriend, at the time, was severely broken with a busted shoulder, pelvis, ribs; you name it, lucky to survive.

As you can see by the shot of Frankie and his bike, he didn’t just go down. I think he was rear-ended by a truck, launching the girl into a parked car. Nasty, but we went to work, while surgeons operated on her at the UCLA Medical Center. Ultimately she healed quickly, but her bones will never forget this jarring encounter.

Fortunately, I spoke to Eric Bennett at Bennett’s Performance in Long Beach, CA, who coached me on frame-straightening with Dr. John, in Anaheim. “The good doctor can straighten some frames by just removing all the sheet metal, wiring and accessories,” Eric said.

I called Dr. John, who told me he could do the job with the rear wheel and the front end in place, but he highly recommended replacing the motormounts as we put the bike back together. I immediately reached out to Custom Cycle Engineering to order a set of their new Dyna rubbermounts. They’ve made improvements to the Dyna mounts and made them adjustable for alignment, which we will dive into.

Frankie is a tattoo artist at Agape in Costa Mesa and Art and Soul in Venice, California between Santa Monica and the airport. He’s recently stepped up to paying taxes for the first time. He needed to start his own tattoo empire, or at least have a company name to write off his expenses against. This Dyna recreation became an opportunity to share his ink vision with the southland.

Several creative endeavors surfaced including how to improve the bike inexpensively, make it custom, repaint with Frank’s tattoo vision, and build a well-handling hot rod. This will take its share of twists and turns. First and foremost, I wanted to improve the ’05 Dyna handling with a 49mm front end, which I scored from Bennett’s. And if possible I wanted to improve the rear with a later-model swingarm or a stronger custom job. This would allow him to run 1-inch axles front and rear. The Custom Cycle Engineering motormounts were also a handling factor.

I didn’t want to just replace the destroyed rear fender, but there are not a lot of Dyna options. Frank found a chopped Dyna fender on EBay and we modified and mounted it.

We took all the sheet metal to Chris Morrison in Harbor City, next to Larry Settle’s Customs Shop. These guys are old school and have been sequestered in the back of a dead-end strip of shops on an industrial back street for 40 years. Fortunately, just up the lane resides another creative endeavor, Yvonne Mecialis’ shop. She’s a master with the airbrush and graphic art. She will take Frank’s vision and apply it to his sheet metal, and she works closely with Chris. We were making progress.

We also needed help from a dealership. Larry had a late model swingarm, cheap and we needed to fill the component holes with bearings and axle adjusters. Frank’s Sons of Anarchy fairing was dinged, and after extensive investigation, he decided on a Harley fairing. We ordered a handful of custom H-D parts and a couple of busted items from the crash including a new set of performance 13-inch H-D shocks.

I wanted the bike not to fly down the all-black path, especially in Los Angeles. There are enough distractions without another all-black stealth machine slipping through lanes. I leaned toward a balanced approach with some stainless, a little chrome on the engine, and some black and color to enhance visibility. Maybe I’m getting old or I’ve built too many blacked-out monsters.

We did find a cool black headlight from Aeromach and some blacked-out replacement levers. But we chose to go with Brass Balls polished aluminum risers and foot pegs. We took the new BDI, used to be Bubs, bare exhaust system out to Applied Engineering for a hot coat and I carved up some heat shields, which Dr. Feng cleaned up but not enough. I don’t like the shape, but the kid needed to ride. We’re burning daylight.

There’s a reason he didn’t shitcan his Dyna and get something else. It was a serious option to sell and move on. Bennett’s Performance installed a hot rod S&S cam into the 88-inch stock motor and tuned it. He loved the way his bike ran and didn’t want to lose his investment. He decided to hang with it. That’s street soul. We will help with Thunder Max tuning from Zipper’s and a full closed-loop EFI system.

This also gave us the opportunity to learn about and try out new products like the mini-cooling system from Love Jugs. And we will learn more about lubricants with Spectro Oil Products.

After several trips to the painter, Harley shops, and coaters, we are now in the assembly mode. We replaced the front and rear rubber isolators with Custom Cycle Engineering enhanced mount on the rear and an FXR type, adjustable mount in the front.

We stripped off the stock swingarm and ran into an issue. The new swingarm comes with a larger diameter pivot axle and it didn’t come with all the parts to replace it.

I reached out to Kent Weeks at Lucky Devil Motor Works in Texas. He suggested using the original axle in the new swingarm. We are currently investigating. That didn’t work, and I made one more trip to see Josh at California Harley in Harbor City. We needed one more bearing.

I instructed Franky to find a manual and a parts book, but they didn’t help with the later model, heavy-duty swingarm. One of Josh’s customers suggested I go online to Shop Ronnie’s Harley-Davidson, a dealer back east. They have downloaded all the parts manual line drawings and they saved the day.