Brian Sowder’s Undercover FXRP
Photos by Francsico RangelPeter LaFrance
Barnett’s Magazine
Every Harley model ever made has its own hardcore cult following. Logic and reason have their place in making a cultist chose their model of choice to worship, but there’s something else that drives them even more. It’s simply an unexplainable passion and FXR freaks are right at or near the top of the list. And, our own Mark Barnett could just be the undeclared de facto leader of FXR worship. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of an FXR that he didn’t see the good in even if he didn’t like a particular bike for aesthetic reasons. If it’s an FXR of any vintage or almost any style, he makes sure to mention it and I can’t think of another model he always sees something good in. So just to let you FXR freaks know, if you’ve got one, take some good pics and send it in to us as it’s almost automatically set for an Article of the Day online.
That’s just about exactly how El Paso’s Brian Sowder got to feature his customized ex-police FXR. Not that it’s not a cool real-world rider or a neat custom bike, there are a lot of them out there. It was an FXR. As soon as I saw the email from Mark about an FXR he was going to get photos of, I knew it was a go if I valued my job at all (and I do). Luckily (for me) Brian’s 1991 FXRP is a clean custom that doesn’t show a lick of its former life as a bike you’d really rather not see in your rear view mirror. Every piece of law enforcement equipment from lights to bags to windshield or fairing is retired and replaced with something much cooler. “I found the bike at Topeka Harley-Davidson and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was in great shape. The tank was painted, but it still had a lot of stock police crap on it,” said Brian. “A lot of ideas of what to do came from sitting around drinking beer with my buddies.”
There was a little thing that got in the way of actually getting the project going, though, and that was Brian’s deployment to Iraq in 2009. “While I was deployed, I had plenty of time to think about what I wanted it to look like and ordered a bunch of parts. In 2010 when I came home, I’m pretty sure my wife was fed up with all of the boxes sitting around the house so I got to work,” he said. “As money let me, I’d get the stuff I couldn’t do get done like having to get it completely rewired by Prairie Hawg Cycle in Manhattan, Kansas, because when they decommissioned it as a police bike, they just cut the wires. I always wanted to build a bike from scratch, but this bike confirmed that I didn’t have the skill set. A beginner’s note: Just because it’s raining doesn’t mean it’s a good time to start yanking parts to put on new ones. A wet day without riding turns into a week or so.”