Rider 8

The world's a mess it's in my kiss.

Damn it's dusty in here...sorry about the lack of posting, been building a new house, barn and turning in a record amount of overtime to pay for the fancy stuff to go in it...lets see where I left off, hit a deer, been riding the FXRP with a busted fairing....still love the bike and wonder how the FXR did not put the Japanese manufacturers out of business, until I read old reviews of the FXR and see why...geeze the hatred of American made motorcycles...the new issue of Walnecks has a review of the 1986 FXRD....well lets just say it is a telling sign of the future American haters that we are seeing the closer we get to 9/11...

But I digress...ever wonder what happened to all the FXR's? I mean they made an awful lot of them, are they pushed away in peoples garages ashamed that they chromed them out and painted them teal and orange?...people don't scrap Harleys...I was noticing all the bikes I see on the road today...lots of old Evo powered Electra glides...not one FXR...(I know Genghis would have a field day with this topic but really I want to know.) Where did they all go?

The ever capable FXR.

I think one of the biggest sins committed against the FXR is that of trying to make it look to “Harleyish.” I have seen Wide Glide front ends, springers, 21” front wheels, (even the factory attempted this, though I did like the Super glide style tank they used with the offset gas bung,) I have seen raked out front ends, fringe covering the side panels, ape hangers, forward controls, and in the case of the former owner of my FXR, chrome side covers slathered with “Live to Ride” googaw from stem to stern.

When I discovered Steve B’s FXR, I bookmarked 45dgree.com and kept going backto it as a blueprint of how I wanted to re-engineer my FXR. Badass and functional. Serious and stylish. While I won’t build mine as a replica/tribute, he sure built a FXR which inspires me…and just like me, he isn’t afraid to change things around to see what works and find what does.

Steve B. can relate. When he bought his FXRSP from the original owner who was selling it because of a divorce, it was covered in LTR treatment. Steve, living in both the IH era and Connecticut, wasn’t about to build his FXR as if he were trying to get laid at Hooters’ bike night in North Hollywood. He lived in the greater NYC area, he had to build a bike that suited his riding and sheet metal battling environment. He started building and experimenting with modifications to his bike to make it what Erik Buell had originally designed to be, the do everything and never let them see you sweat bike.



Dual Sport touring bike…before there was such a thing? Check.

Convertible touring bike? Check.

Lane splitting NYC curb jumper? Check.

Blacked out and Classy enough to take the wife to the local Valet parking required restaurant…hey it’s a FXR! Fucking eh!



Blacked out in a manner that causes the over-done user-repellent flat black crowd to scratch their head and wonder what kind of motorcycle it is… “Yo dude, is that like a new Honda Nightstar/ShadesofCustom…hey I’m wearing my new Dickies and Work Jacket…did you see my bias plied tires?” Yeah Steve, I’m afraid either we were ahead of our time or we were trendsetters. I’m going to blame you; you worked for a magazine that had more readers than I did. (Can we just blame Buzz? The obvious trendsetter!)

Fast and great handling curve carver, (well it is a FXR, that’s kind of a given, but the 89” S&S stroker kit installed by Tom Haner of H&L Performance really upped the ante.) You know that Erik is secretly reading my blog right? You know he is! How proud he must be!


I really dig the blacked out treatment on his FXR. I’ve joked about my driveway, but it really is rough and my shortcut to work is a downhill, (or uphill on the way home,) gravel road and I leave my bike outside in the rain at work…black works for me the same way it works for Steve… polyester aesthetics; rinse and ride. Plus it looks great. But what really stands out is that Steve’s bike was built as a real rider, you can look at the changes and see that he messed around with what worked and changed it according to what suited his need. I really dig his Cut-up Gunfighter solo seat…those Gunfighter seats were butt ugly to start with; another weak attempt at making an FXR look Harleyish…just like that gawd awful Warbird fairing kit Hamsters used to install on their FXRs. (I should have my readers dig thru their old mags, and scan pictures of the gawd awful renditions of FXRs the Hamsters did…) However, Steve made the Gunfighter seat actually attractive thanks to a Sawzall and a good fling!


Steve can been found at 45dgree.com (where you can also find a updated version of Walt Siegl’s Shovelhead…the very same Walt Siegl featured years ago in IH with a primer grey shovelhead built by English Don, Steg and Indian Larry.) You can also find Steve at SteveB’s leatherworks; http://steveb.biz/2008/

Hopefully next spring Steve will give us here at the Chronicle a curb jumping epic celebration of Industrial NYC …stayed tuned!

AtlasFlynched indeed!

This is where it all begins....

Sometimes I will have a lot to say...sometimes I will be late for work and/or pissed off/disgusted that I have to spell out everything to simple minded imbeciles and assume the picture will do all the talking...for instance this shot...if anything about this shot offends you, go away, sell your bike...NO better, give it away you don't deserve to ride on the same planet that I live on...or breathe the same air. FTFO. This is about more than simple survival…this is about Thriving… Victory…not dying…LIVING!




This is Tom FN Rose and he is my hero. You will read a lot here at the Chronicle about people like TFNR…people who realize that they are heirs to the oxygen that the likes of Ben Franklin, Meriwether Lewis, Pete Rose, (yeah Fuckers…I saw the fucker Charlie Hustle in 1976…he held nothing back!) Henry Ford…Lance Fucking Armstrong… Thaddeus Fucking Kosciuszko exhaled…you getting my drift…he is not wasting his breath. He is not pretending and hoping that the Family of five in the Mini-Van thinks he may be the big bad outlaw biker boogeyman…He is too busy living…LIVING! That is a whole other world of motorcycling.

Fifteen years ago Tom showed up on my doorstep, loudly and smiling after riding from the toxin free midwestern prairie to the office of the now defunct Iron Horse magazine in pre-Rudy NYC to get his bike shot and to meet the staff. He didn’t call ahead or ask, he knew his bad muthafucker Warpig FXR would make the cut, no matter that FXR’s were not the standard fair for the magazine. I however did not work in the NYC office, so he left his number and the editor passed it to me, warning that this Tom Rose character was a strange one indeed, too clean cut, determined, happy… to be riding such a wild motorcycle…this was years before the internet so all I could go on was a description over the phone…no one was building radical FXR’s and no one was building to withstand the apocalypse. I give the guy a call and discover that me and the Road Warrior jr. must have ancestry linkage, even if it was way back when the first Volcano erupted…but I digress, it wasn’t my doorstep he showed up to, it was at my wedding…tired from riding straight thru from Rhode Island to Kentucky in the rain, he in grand fashion showed up laughed and became a member of my extended family.

I knew there were others out there like me, who didn’t fit the stereotypical biker mold that just because we chose to ride stripped down radical machines did not mean we were the same as the ones that came before us, who only chose to ride radical machines out of fashion identity, not out of necessity. I didn’t ride stripped down and ground down machines to fit in, quite the opposite. The whole biker lifestyle doesn’t interest me. Getting to the other end and back does. Accomplishing the mission. In and out…WTF Over. MCLMM!

I don’t think I have ever met a person whose bike fit them quite as well. The bike is as mysterious and action packed as the owner. Focused and determined to survive the apocalypse and thrive in it…It is still the only Magneto powered kickstart only FXR that I know of. Over the course of this blog, you will learn more about Tom and other like him, and their machines…this is how it all begins.

While I hesitate to define exactly what this blog will consist of, I will hold this man and his machine as a scale of measurement. Don’t be offended by the shit you read, FKRS if you aren’t living up to this scale. If you’re still reading and not holding your breath, welcome aboard. Hold on. Strap in and ROCK ON!

High speed low drag indeed.