Mmm... Choppers...

So Aaron got a house with a sweet garage. OF course the guy with the garage ends up storing crap for all the people who don;t have a garage or are in some way transient, like Brian, who has been staying with his parents or inlaws for over a year. One of the things Aaron was storing for Brian was this sweet little GT fresstyle bike frame. We decided to kill several birds with one stone, and build Brian a chopper out of it. That way we get rid of the frame, get rid of the parts that go on it, and make a funny joke by not telling him about our plans first :) Hopefully this page will be the first he hears of it :)

The primary modification was to cut off the head tube and reweld it at an insanely raked angle. Using the chopsaw of couse.

They don't call it a chopper for nothing.

With the headtube removed, we then had to birdsmouth the toptube and downtube to accept the headtube at it's new angle.

Dave toils away at the grinder

Looks good to me. Let's start cutting and welding!

The coolest part about this bike is the double-crown fork. We made it from a pair of replacement suspension forks for forks with 1 inch stanchions. We made the fork blades out of 1 inch tubing and drilled out the top fork crown to slide over the top of the fork. Then it was just a matter of cranking down the headset parts to keep everything solid.

Anyone who has built a way raked out chopper like this has probably experienced at least one bike that is almost completely unridable because the steering geometry is way wrong. This is one such bike :)