stained spruce facia

I have been working on installing the front wood on the bar and finally finished but it looked like a wild west saloon with the untreated spruce standing out like a sore thumb. I bought and returned five or six pints of stain before enlisting the help of wood stain guru and all around good guy Ross Morgan of Morgans Woodshop for some faux treatment consultation. I began with a watered down pail of white kilz paint and rolled that on. I let it dry then watered down a water-based black paint and brushed it on for that 'old' look. Thank you Ross for the direction. I am very happy with the results.

New exterior shot

I have almost completed the spruce exterior and will probably just install the wood around the door and paint the door red. Ross suggested I do a silver "wash" of black and white paint watered way down and rolled onto the wood to mimic the silver color it will turn as it ages. I can't wait that long. I want it silver NOW. I have all of the booths and will go purchase the vinyl for the bottoms that I am missing and some shiny red vinyl for the inside panel on the door.

Seven new HEATHENS videos

While trying to master the video editor, I put together seven new Heathens videos for you to enjoy. It's FAST humor. http://www.youtube.com/user/chmediagroup

Hook Up sign night view and bar wall construction

Here's a photo of the completed sign after Ky installed today. Next is the installation of the spruce facia and front bench fabrication. Mason and I built about half of the bar yesterday. We will build the radius that leads to the other wall tomorrow and possibly the bar top. There's only about 27" between the front and rear beer coolers for the bartender but I guess I don't need much distance to move around back there anyway.

Trike seat fabrication

Here is a photo of the bike with the rear seat structure. Rodney and I put a small grab bar in front of each seat for safety's sake but there isn't much safety for the riders of the Pleasuredome, that's for sure. Tomorrow we mount the headlight and taillight/license plate bracket and make a battery box.

Making a new sign for the bar.

First thing you do is pick a name, measure the panels for the signage, design a panel and take it over to your local sign guy, mine being Sharp Signs in Westminster, CA. Ky at Sharp Signs has fabricated all the signage I have ever designed from the Avalon arrow to the church cross neon to the Charles Todaro Gallery sign and all plastic signage in between. Here they are laying out the panels...

Yokohama trike coming along smoothly.

Rodney and I have been bending up the tubing to mount the rear seats and oil bag and it is looking like a real bike now.

How to buy and build a bar in 60 days.

The Monroe Club was, I am told, the last true dive bar in Huntington Beach, CA. The last owner was running hookers out of it....rumor has it, of course...not a week before I got it. I have known about the bar for the last four years and stopped by weekly to talk to the property owner to check status. In June, the owner mentioned that the lease holder was in arrears thirty days on rent going on sixty. From that day forward I carried six grand in my back pocket and stopped in to the property owners office every morning at opening time. Eviction was begun and the Sheriff was expected to post the eviction at any moment. I could then sign a new lease and get the place. Up until the moment the Sheriff tacks the notice up, the lease holder has the right to pay his back rent and continue his lease.The owner had it on the market for 125k and couldn't come to agreement on price. He then turned his electricity off which constitutes abandonment. He did that on a Tuesday night, I was there on Wednesday morning at 8:30 signing the new lease and twenty minutes later the old lease holder is arguing with my locksmith in front of the bar while holding a check for 11k to pay the back rent and penalties. Too late. Gotcha on a technicality. The new bar is called The Hook Up.

When building a bar, you want to cut costs wherever you can. I have taken to scavenging behind local warehouses for wood. Here we have Mason post load up of the 1" ply, 3/4" ply, built radius corners and moulding I got from behind an abandoned warehouse off of the 405 and Goldenwest. That wood ain't cheap. Mason says it's worth at least 400 bucks if I were to buy it from Lowes. This should build the bar back, bar top and armrest plus the raised dj booth. The last photo shows the giant beams stacked near the pile we pilfered from. Holy crap those were big trees!

1960 Ford Starliner body and paint completed

The galleon is almost completed and it is looking very nice. Maestro, my 125.00 a day bodywork friend and I knocked out the 'to the metal' bodywork job in two weeks of eight hour days. As we worked, I had my friend Tran stitch up a full show interior in white naugahyde covered in diamond stitch pattern, which I am fond of. (see interior of panel truck) I am cloning a car that I had many great memories in...Joe Kennedy's 60 starliner which he called 'The Galleon'. Joe, Pokey and I were coming back from somewhere in Huntington Beach, up Beach Blvd at about Talbert when a car full of women pulled up and told us to pull over. We pull over, they pull over, a couple girls jump out and jump into our car and off we go. We didn't even talk. It just turned into a make out session down Beach Blvd. That happened on Beach and Slater once when I was on my motorcycle. I'm glad Russell witnessed that. That shit only happens in movies.

Da Bomb!!

I guess you need to be in the know to know what this is and how it relates to me. Whatever you do, DON'T eat the whole thing in one sitting! Nervous breakdown!

Clear Outer Primary

Scott Craig and I put our heads together and, with the help of an aircraft windshield maker friend of mine, hand vacuum formed 12 of these clear big twin outer primaries. This was a fun project but sadly I got the short end of the stick and only ended up with one for all of my effort. I still have that one cover in the garage. It was fun working with that machine and cutting out the forms on the bandsaw. They turned out great: that I remember. We took them to Japan and I don't think we sold even one there. We were sure they were going to be a hit. (kind of like the lighters! Ha!) They eventually ended up at some shop of Scott's in Echo Park where they got lost or were stolen or something to that effect. Either way, it was a cool experience with a cool product for the scene. I wonder where they all ended up?

Asphalt Gods, A Photographic History

This is a project that has been on the top of my OCD list for the last three or four years. I started out playing music with lyrics from a 60's club members point of view and that turned into a three camera, two car shoot from California to South Dakota to interview the original members of the Venice and South Bay Heathens Motorcycle Family. Crazy. I couldn't believe I was going to actually do it while I was coordinating the camera crew and renting vehicles. If someone came to me and said "hey, I'm going to hang out with this motorcycle gang that I met. You want to bring a video camera and film it?" I would think that guy was crazy. Motorcycle clubs don't put up with that shit. Well, this group liked me enough to let me sit down with them and tell the story of the rise and fall of their club in the 70's and 80's. Hours and hours and hours of video footage, interviews, hundreds of vintage photos collected and too many crazy stories to tell in one sitting. That turned into the book that you see here. It turns out editing is extremely expensive and this movie is going to take a good chunk of time in the editing booth. Toru, a friend I met thru Mooneyes and my trips to the Mooneyes show in Yokohama, took the time to lay this out for me and it is up on the web and selling a few a week. www.asphaltgods.net Maybe this movie will get made after all.

Biker Cover #2

The goal of building bikes has always been to look cool, go fast, and hopefully, in the end, contribute to motorcycling and custom style in a positive way. Hopefully, someday, could be tomorrow or 20 years down the road, someone looks at the bikes my friends and I have done and are inspired to continue a true 60's style. My favorite style that I hope lives on with these two bikes. # 272 February, 2011 Biker Magazine

Biker Cover #1

This was my first cover and it was a big deal to me. I really love Biker Magazine. It's as close to the old magazines as you can get. You can tell every issue may be the last but the editor and contributors just won't let it die as long as clubs continue to run around the U.S. I hope that my contributions to this great magazine added to the cool factor. When I designed this sissybar, everyone and their uncles told me that would immediately vibrate itself to death and break off. It took years to actually bust off on the offramp to a bar I was riding out to for Scott Craig's birthday. The bar was called the TeeYee. I pulled up at the bar and 'damn', I thought. 'Where the hell did that go?' I rode home that night with a hope that I would find it on a trip up the freeway in the morning. LaLa and I jumped into the ranger and did 20 miles an hour in the fast lane from my house to that off ramp and back for a second pass. I found it on the damn offramp that took me to the bar. I put it back on and a year or two later it broke off on the 22 freeway at about Magnolia heading West. I felt it break off and faintly heard it tink tink behind me into nowhere. I pulled over and turned the bike around on the shoulder and started riding the opposite way on the freeway. Not very smart but I have been known to make bad decisions. Anyway, riding the wrong way on the shoulder I come upon a honda civic facing the wrong way with a flat tire, parked in a pool of radiator fluid. The elderly asian man is standing in the iceplant with his hands to his head as I pull up. I jump off the bike and he comes up and tells me that 'a shiny thing popped his tire and killed his radiator'. I bent over and looked under the car but no sissybar. I wished him luck and continued on down the freeway on the bike in the hopes that I would find the sissybar. I got stopped by the cops at Harbor and was told to keep going on foot or turn the bike around and follow the flow of traffic. Ok. I hoofed it one more exit but no dice. The sissybar attacked the honda and disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again. # 241, November, 2006 Biker Magazine

looking back on the last few years

I have been thinking back, over the last few years, and going over all of the stuff that I did, tried to do, wanted to do and didn't, thought of doing and forgot to, obsessed over, and so on and so forth. Let's look back on a few of these things. I thought that these zippos were going to be the last word in cool. They didn't sell worth a damn in Japan. They sure were fun to design and lay out. I found a guy down a back street in a bad neighborhood in Saigon. A referral from some other shady dude at a used zippo shop. The engraver guy, his son, and I negotiated, haggled, went over designs, kicked around this and that, ate pho, haggled some more and finally came to an agreement on eight designs and a logo thrown in on the backside. Looking back, it was a really good deal at the price I ended at when you break it down per zippo but I could have done better if I had more time to source the zippos. I decided to do this two days before I was to fly out so I was on a tight schedule. Drew the designs out on a bunch of napkins in a noodle joint under the shadow of New World Hotel. I'm sure it was humid as hell. Takes me back to that shop every time I watch Apocalypse Now.

I found some new stuff going on...very excited.

First off, the 47 panel has passed on into other hands now. A guy and his dad came by and showed the cash so off it went. They were old chevrolet truck guys so it went to a good home. They mentioned leaving the two-tone primer job so keep an eye out. In it's place is a 1960 Ford Starliner. Very nice. I got it running and did the brakes up, had the worst of the rust dealt with and all of the trim is out at the polisher/chromer as you read this. Juwan has it so pray for me. I'll be cloning the late, great starliner, 'THE GALLEON'. Those of you in the know remember this grand chariot crushing the streets from Fullerton to Huntington and all points in between. Built by Joe Kennedy in '95, it was sadly sold to some rockabilly goof who stashed it in a garage until he hit the lean times and sold it to a car shop who completely tore it apart and made a SIMA sympathy wagon out of it. I'll be slapping a nice white paint job on it. Top to be bronze. White leather interior. Astro supremes to be sure. The Undertaker will be putting the brush to it at some point. The beautiful LeBaron is now officially for sale. 2k for that incredible machine.

Secondly, I have a new guitar from my friends at Hidecore Leather. All class.