133 E. Jericho Turnpike
Mineola, NY 11501

Eddie came to us around October 2000 with a frame in his hands and a request: "Build me a fast, classy custom cruiser that's different." Take a look at the pictures, and you be the judge of whether or not we met that goal, but as far as Eddie's concerned.......well, just take a look at his expression as he posed with his first trophy—that'll tell you! His bike took "Best Custom In Show" at the 2001 annual Nassau County FireRiders Custom Bike Show. And you can believe it was up against some stiff competition, which included "Dave's Blue Bullet" and "Project Metamorphosis" along with a bevy of custom built bikes from all over Long Island and Queens!

Tech
Specs

The Queens, NY, area is where Eddie does most of his riding and reliability was a major concern. With all the typical Queens traffic, we feel a hot running/overheating engine was in keeping with Eddie's desire for class, and breaking down is NOT classy! Thus, the motor was kept at 80 inches with a liveable 10.1:1 compression ratio and a "little" head work to add some punch. Plenty powerful for day-to-day riding on the hot city streets as well as for a quick get-away up the Palisades Parkway to the Catskills for a weekend on much cooler mountain roads.

In terms of chassis work, lots of cutting, grinding, and welding were done to get the fenders (especially the front one) to track the rims precisely. The rear fender struts were cut down approximately 3 inches to fit the rear fender properly.

The toughest part of the project was finding the base color for the bike's paint job. Eddie had seen a California hot-rod pictured in a magazine and fell in love with the color. The major problem? After some research, we discovered the paint was a custom mix by DuPont that was made to special order and they could not guarantee batch-to-batch color match. Samples had to be bought, shot, rejected, re-bought, re-shot etc. until the mix was just right. Much credit goes to Brian at Splatterhouse Graphics for his incredible patience (and endurance) during this process. He created the multi-colored tribal graphics and background checkerboard tank panels using House of Kolor hues.

After 6 months of planning, fitting, painting and assembling we were done—and Eddie's "Classy Cruiser" was done. Did we meet Eddie's requirements? We thought so, and so did he!

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