A little over six years ago, four Bay Area motorcycle enthusiasts started talking about advertisements they had seen for new motorcycles. The ads said anyone could get out and enjoy the freedom of the road and excitement of leaning a powerful machine into hairpin turns--all for the bargain basement price of $50,000.

Alex Frith, Mike King, Wendell Jones, and Paul "Poll" Brown started complaining that prices so far beyond the average person's means went against the spirit of riding that got them on two wheels in the first place. As riders will sometimes do, the four started talking about how much better and cheaper they could build a perfect custom bike for themselves. One claimed he could build a bike for less than $1,000. They all agreed that would be simple, but a real challenge would be a personal custom bike built for less than $1,000 in one month.

And the Dirtbag Challenge Low Rent Chopper Build Off was born.
The seventh annual Dirtbag Challenge event went off in a roar of fire, steel and spraying rubber Sunday, October 18, with three rock bands, no serious injuries, and almost every entered bike completing the group ride without serious mechanical problems. Sure, gas and rubber were splattered across bikes, fans, and walls, but nothing the men and women who spent the previous month building motorcycles were unable to handle with a few minutes and a beer.

The music, the beer, the crowd of more than a thousand: all of it made for a good time for motorcycle lovers from the Bay Area. But at the heart of the event was the reality that both Poll and Wendell Jones wanted to drive home for dirtbag motorcycle fans everywhere: anyone can build a choice bike, customized to fit their style, with just a little money and a lot of motivation.

Jones, a 46-year-old "super-custom" fabricator with a shop in Berkeley, wanted the Dirtbag Challenge to get people to build "whatever crazy-ass bike they want to ride. The weirder, the better," he says.

Poll said he was in love with choppers ever since he was a kid. Sheepishly, he admits: "It's totally fucking corny, but Easy Rider was a great film and it really was what a chopper is all about."

So who might be a dirtbag? Not just shop owners or racers. Dirtbag Challenge builders worked for school districts and the San Francisco Opera in 2009. After meeting a few of this year's entrants, maybe you will find that you have got a little dirtbag in you before the 2010 build off has begun.

The Darlin' Dirtbags are five women who put together one of the most aggressive and flashy choppers at the event. Their seriously customized '83 Suzuki VF 450 cobbled together the effort of Tegan Hetzel-Dobbins, president of the San Francisco Motorcycle Club, Jenn Bromme, owner of Werkstatt Motorcycles, Jeanne Park, an ironworker for San Francisco Unified School District, Cary Spidell, a program manager for UCSF, and Cathy Courtney, a computer network administrator.

Their bike is an effort in supreme cooperation. Bromme brings her considerable mechanic skills to bear, and Park uses her experience working with metal to help customize the frame and fit the rear wheel with individually machined spacers. Spidell pilots the bike for the group ride. Hetzel-Dobbins supplies the custom upholstered seat with "Darlin Dirtbags" embroidered across the saddle and Courtney invests some serious energy into fittings and grinding and polishing metal on the bike.

The day before the challenge the whole team is helping to bring everything together before deadline. At any given time on that Saturday morning three or four women are crouching beside or bending over a specific part of the bike, working in tandem. After a month of collaboration, tensions are high but they are able to work in close quarters and keep out of one another's task. By this point, they themselves are a well-oiled machine and have their bike up and running with more than twelve hours to spare.

After her first test run on their new custom chopper, Bromme smiles wryly with a simple, "It's fucking cool man! All that hard work paid off."

Bromme says the team succeeded because many people helped to get the bike on its wheels. The whole team offers thanks and credit to Jeff Daly, who offered his Treasure Island metal shop, Dennis Hodges for lathe work, Shawn Campbell for making spacers, and Chuck Whegan for a thousand trips for parts, coffee and food.

The team's bike is built with absolutely no unessential parts. Spidell heads out on the group ride with only a front brake, since time has run short and rear brakes are just a bonus on a dirtbag bike. And when Whegan asks Spidell where the speedometer is she licks her finger and holds it in the air with a smile. "Wind? My finger? I'll know when it's fast," she answers. The Darlin' Dirtbags' bike completes the group ride with minimal mechanical issues. When Spidell bumps her chest into the rubber stopper sealing the gas tank, she is covered in gasoline the remainder of the ride.

"What do you expect, you know?" Spidell says. "You do Dirtbag, it gets a little messy. Don't catch on fire and change your clothes when it's all over."

The longest, sleekest and most barebones chopper at the challenge is Turk's eight-and-a-half foot long machine. Turk, 44, who grew up in southern New Jersey and was given the moniker by a childhood friend who said a Turk is the guy who can get you what you need, no matter what or how, and the name stuck.

Between his job working for the San Francisco Opera, side work machining and building, and helping to take care of his girlfriend's children, Turk manages to build a custom bike in just under seven days for about $571 total cost. Although he admits he only had to spend $303 out of pocket, as many materials were lying around his shop.

With his limited time, and a penchant for meticulous work, Turk connects two chains to span the length of his bike, then maintains tension using a grooved skateboard wheel. His handmade exhaust pipe looks more like an early flamethrower than any conventional exhaust system. His fuel tank is a small, leaky metal barrel strapped to the front of the handlebars.

At 11:59 p.m. on the seventh day, Turk is able to start his bike up with a tremendous roar and a plume of white smoke. As he revs the throttle to warm the engine and find issues for a late-night fix, a huge grin spreads from ear to ear.

"I can't believe it came in just under the wire like that," Turk says. "I mean, now I've got to look for everything that goes wrong before the ride. But I did it in seven days. And it feels great."

Turk and his silver, skeletal bike complete the entire group ride, and just three blocks from the parking lot where each dirtbag will try to burn off his rear tire, Turk's cask-like fuel tank springs a leak and starts pouring gas over the hot engine while he burns rubber. He quickly zips back to his shop, stops up the holes, and is back at the party in less than an hour.

"I'm just glad it made it to the end," he says. "It felt great and did really well, so I fix up the one or two little things and I'll be able to ride it all the time." [X]