Denny Berg

I don't want to sound like one of those old, crusty bikers I knew when I was young who started conversations with "Well, Sonny, when I was your age, we used to ...," but if you've been in this business long enough, everything comes full circle.

I recently overheard a conversation about the quality of some of today's products, something about how a frame a guy had purchased was 1/8th of an inch out of alignment. Not earth-shaking news, but I couldn't help thinking about some of the products I had bought 30 or 40 years ago.still have an old Triumph bolt-on hardtail that has flame-cut axle plates and tubing ends that were smashed in a vice to form the bolt-on flanges. I'm not talking about CNC parts. These things were cut with an old oxy-acetylene torch, probably by someone with the hang-over shakes. The welds were done with a stick welder, as evident by the slag still covering the blobs of metal.

I keep it around to remind me of the good ol' days.

Getting Forked

If you don't have an AARP card yet, you probably don't remember slugs. These were fork extensions that you screwed into the top of your existing forks. Then you slid the legs down through the lower clamp and put the fork cap back on, and — Ta Da! — you had extended forks.

Don't laugh. Lots of these were sold before the advent of one-piece extended tubes. I was working in a shop in the early '70s, and a crashed bike came in with two slug sets screwed into each leg. The joint at the original fork tubes was below the lower clamp. When the rider had hit a set of railroad tracks, both lower slugs snapped off and sent him and his girlfriend sliding down the road. Looking cool overshadowed common sense.

Even in the early days of over-stock fork tubes, many still had machine marks that ate fork seals. Some custom springers had no bushings in the rockers and just rode on half-inch bolts with washers and locknuts to adjust the play. Chrome was cheap then, so a guy could cover up the hardware store water pipe markings stamped into the metal. Early fork tubes, springers and frames bent or snapped at an alarming rate. I myself snapped off the clutch side of a set of Z-bars while pulling out into traffic on a test drive. It seemed like anyone with a torch and a stick welder was getting into the business.

In some of the old custom bike rags there are articles on extending Harley springers with Ford radius rods, and how to gusset and mold your frame, and to rake a Harley neck with just a cutting torch, three oversized bikers, a six-pack and a Lincoln stick welder. One article explains how to narrow and extend an H-D springer with water pipe and some twisted square stock stolen from a neighbor's wrought-iron gate.

It's a wonder any of us survived those early years.

Junked and Busted

In the '70s it seemed like lawyers were everywhere, just waiting to cash in on a lawsuit.

Don't get me wrong, there were manufacturers putting out safe products, but those items cost more than the junk. And there was a lot of junk. Early organizations like the MMA tried to police us. We had to do something before the government did. My worry is that this might happen again because of not only the inferior products, but how the public and law enforcement perceive our machines.

Will Build for Food

The first "Gas Crisis" in the '70s was good for dealers of small bikes, but custom shops suffered due to Joe Biker's lack of income, and the industry remained dormant for a few years. Meanwhile, we all had to pay the rent. Some went back to their day jobs. I did dirtbike tune-ups, chainsaw repairs and even some lawnmower rebuilds.