Custom Harley-Davidson XLCH “Bad Attitude”
Building a custom motorcycle is a labor of love, of learning, and of personal growth. Jared Smith from El Cerrito, California, had time but had never built a bike before. Twelve months ago when Jared started building his 1960 XLCH Ironhead, he had never welded a single bead. After picking the bike up cheap as a non runner – spray painted black – he started learning, doing, and fabricating. With a clear vision of the bikes final look. “I was going for an ‘old but loved’ look to the build” he says, “and purposely used vintage components where I could that had not been refurbished, everything else I wanted to make by hand.” With YouTube as his training aid he spent the next year building what you see on these pages. Meet the Ironhead named ‘The Bad Investment’… We like the name but with his skills we think it was a good investment.Jared stripped the bike down after collecting his Craigslist gem. After the tear down Jared was left with the parts he really wanted, the engines cases, the frame, and the seats. “The motor needed couple new cylinders, new pistons, new heads… basically the motor needed a new motor” he says. He decided to give the engine to professionals and sent it to Hannan’s Machine Shop to rebuild the top end and S&J Cycles in Santa Rosa to rebuild the lower. Which gives you a mostly brand new motor with some extra oomph.
For the overall look, Jared knew he wanted a red, white and blue AMF tank. Queue Craigslist again and he eventually found one with the gas marks and eroded paint down one side. “That’s the point of using all these old parts, they all have a story – that’s what’s exciting to me – combining vintage parts with new fabrication.”
One of the first things Jared fabricated was the sissy bar. “I laid out all the parts with string and drew full size renderings of it several times before I started cutting and bending. I wanted the lines of the cross brace bars to mimic the lines of the stripes on the AMF tank” he says. The ring at the top where the taillight is mounted was an additional Jared touch.
The taillight is an old warning panel light Jared picked up at an estate sale. After machining a new inner housing for the taillight that can be threaded together so it all fits together snug around the ring on the sissy bar. It also holds Turkish coin with a deer on it as the backing plate. Minor detail major impact.
Jared made made a velocity stack from a 4″ round stock of 6061 aluminum , he turned down and bored the piece out on his lathe, then drilled and tapped for set screws at 120° offset. All that work holds a detailed grill is from a 1920’s Zenith dynamic microphone.
Handmade rear fender, vertical license plate, foot pegs, shifter, mechanical brake arm linkage, carb slide topper and headlight mounting bracket and more. Notice the Blue Jack logo acid-etched into the license plate holder. It’s too bad it will be covered up but again those little details make a build stand out.
Aa year ago when Jared brought this “Bad Investment”, he had some hammers, a few junk tools, a $90 dollar flux-core welder and barely any knowledge of how to use them properly. A year later, there a metal lathe, a tig welder, a drill press, a belt sander, a disc sander, several buffing and polishing machines and a wealth of knowledge contained in the hands of the builder that you just can’t buy. Like we said at the top maybe it should be called “Good Investment”.
