Best Choppers & Customs at the 10th Annual ‘Born Free’ Bike Show

By Bryan Wood - June 29, 2018

Builders & bike fans converge in SoCal to rock, roll, and ride.

For the tenth year in a row, the builders displaying their bikes at the Born Free Motorcycle Show in Silverado, California, have raised the bar. The 2017 show added to the activities skaters shredding a half-pipe, and a night of amateur hooligan flat track racing. For 2018, Born Free upped the ante, adding to the mix a new minibike class, and the smooth aquatic sounds of Yachty by Nature as the headline act to mellow things out.

The bike show always features plenty of traditional style choppers, bobbers, builds, and customs, but that isn’t all you will see. There are plenty of cool 1970s-style “long bike” choppers with ludicrously-extended front ends. Cafe racers and scramblers were also well represented by Harley-Davidson as well as other powerplants. There was even a Harley-powered, direct-drive, speedway racing bike from Australia, built for head-to-head sprint races around a small oval dirt track. There were many other race bikes and race replicas for just about any genre of racing that you could imagine a Harley competing in.

Finally, there were the bikes that just refused to be pigeonholed.

Born Free doesn’t have to offer up much in the way of incentive to get folks to show up. But this year a raffle to give away bikes went above and beyond. Harley-Davidson offered up a 2018 Fat Bob to one lucky winner, Devin Seymour. In addition to that awesome win, Prism Supply built a sweet 1968 Panhead chopper as a second prize, won by Paul Kuvelis. But the top award was a 1945 Knucklehead that had been left ratty and was given a full mechanical restoration. Brook Lund was the winner of this enviable bike.

Surprisingly, the skaters on the half-pipe were not all young kids; many were well past middle age. It seems that much like motorcycles, people don’t stop riding skateboards because they get old. It is the other way around: They get old because they stopped riding. The guy leading the charge and bringing out the Vans skate ramp was legendary pro skater Steve Caballero. Caballero collects and races motorcycles, as well.

Going to big summer bike shows with music, beer, and lots of cool stuff to look at is always fun. But when the bikes are as awesome as they always are at Born Free, and the crowd is as laid back as this one was, it makes you wish they happened every week. When there is nothing but bad news on TV and social media, a show like Born Free is a welcome bright spot. It is hard to spend the day there and not want to rush home and start building something cool.

One of the biggest draws of the Born Free show is the slate of invited builders. The afternoon’s Born Free Award went to Colorado custom builders Cry Baby Cycles, which was recognized for its uniqueness and coloring outside of the lines.

Best in Show went to Justin Walls’ land speed racing Harley, which was built around a Model UL bottom end with a vintage aftermarket OHV conversion. To see more of this bike, check out the Justin Walls BTTW Instagram page.

Many people have lamented that Harley-Davidson is losing the youth market. Young people seem too into the virtual world to want to buy and ride motorcycles. Looking around at the Born Free crowd would seem to refute that fact, though. There were tons of people there in the 18- to 40-year-old demographic that is so important to marketing. Let’s hope this a sign of good things to come.