Building a custom bike
How custom can your bike be? How much money do you have.
 In
the warehouse that is the Skunkworx Custom Cycle shop in Columbus, Ohio,
Skunkworx boss Bruce Mullins (right) paces the floor, talking into a
cellphone.
He's negotiating with a parts supplier, trying to exchange some parts,
and providing the specs for custom-built new ones.
In another part of the shop, Jim Davis and another Skunkworx employee
are grinning from ear-to-ear as they examine their latest handiwork.
They've modified the frame of an old minibike, turning it into a
minichopper.
 In
a corner of the shop, an employee sands metal fenders and a gas tank,
preparing them for paint. And in yet another part of the shop, a worker
snakes wiring through the handlebars and frame of an almost-completed
custom bike.
The shop phone rings. Mullins lays down the cell phone and grabs the
shop phone. Then a potential customer walks in the door, asking about
custom bike prices and options.
 It's
just the beginning of another work day at the Skunkworx.
If you want the pros at Skunkworx to build you a bike, be prepared to
spend at least $25,000 and wait two-to-eight months for a completed bike,
depending on how much fabrication and custom work is involved.
 Mullins
sits down just long enough to explain the process of coming up with the
vision for a bike if a customer walks in the door with an armload of cash.
First, Mullins says, he tries to get a sense from the customer of what
he wants.
"What style do you want," Mullins will ask. "For
example, do you want a tall and long chopper, or a low street rod?
"And do you want a hardtail or softtail?" Mullins will ask.
"What size engine?"
With basic questions out of the way, Mullins then tells the customer to
go home and spend some time thumbing through motorcycle magazines to put
together a portfolio of photos of things that the customer likes.
With those photos in hand, the customer comes back and Mullins goes
over the ideas with him, telling him what would work when combining
aspects of different bikes, what won't work, and offering new suggestions
that may be variations of what the customer sees in the magazines.
 "Not
all the customers have a sense of symmetry," Mullins explains.
"If I butt heads with someone who wants something that is ugly and
tacky, then I might pull out of the project because my name's on it,"
he adds.
Luckily, he says, that doesn't happen much. Most customers are open to
his suggestions involving the lines on the bike, paint scheme and other
details.
"I try to steer people away from component bikes" where you
just pick components out of catalogs or from various companies' websites
"because that's not a custom motorcycle," Mullins says.
"It's a point-and-click motorcycle."
 A
surprising number of customers find a wheel style they like then basically
want to build a bike around them.
For example, someone who decides on "Warlock" wheels from RC
Components would want a medieval theme for the rest of the bike, he says.
Once the customer knows what he wants and Mullins knows he can do it,
the work begins. Mullins says he encourages the customer to drop by as
often as he wants to see how the work is progressing.
In the case of the Skunkworx/Jim Davis bike that Mullins and Davis are
about to begin building, they already know what they want: a stunning
long-and-low street rod.
Following the build:
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