Wednesday, October 15, 2008

John Edwards Panhead Pt. 3

The third installment on John Edwards Panhead.  Today's post John talks about the build. Enjoy.
It is a ‘52 Panhead with a late ‘54 to ’57 straight leg frame with LOTS of modifications done to it. It has a molded Peanut tank, an old leather seat and also a Custom Cycle Engineering dish pans, bird deflector and foot pegs. The foot pegs are rare and hard to find. I got one from Nelson Kanno, “Thanks Nelson”, and the other from Tim Wallingford.

It has stomper brakes like they used in the bay area, early sixties flavor ripple pipes and Magneto, Stelling risers and bars. The Stelling risers were designed for stock springer front top clamps. So if a guy fell and bent the bars, you could chop them off and put on another set of bars. There is a chromed ribbed English rear fender and WM0 Front wheel. Those are kind of sought after. I got the wheels from Johnny Chop. I haven’t seen any on a bike except mine and one other guy I know. Chica had helped out a lot on the bike. He did the wiring and a lot of the welding.

We made the pipes together and I did most of the fabrication. Brawny did the tank. It has a 1935 VL front end that I bought off of Jeff Decker’s dad Allen, years ago. The paint is a special mix to make the lavender color. I had help with the search for parts from Mike D.

Tomorrow's post will have the final part of the story as told by John Edwards and some riding shots from the photo session.

1 comment:

Kris said...

that bike is dope.