Boomers Bike Shop

What is a bike shop with no bikes?! We can’t have that! We are selling as quickly as we’re buying and fixing right now. Once it was ready, I posted the Ice Bike online. A man from Milwaukee bought it and came to get it. When he showed up at the shop, it was Scott Johnson of Fuel Café and the Mama Tried Motorcycle Show. He loved the bike! He said he was looking forward to racing the bike at Mama Tried. He was really cool, and even gave us some tickets to check out the show! Josh was able to get that ‘77 FLH running. Now, when the starter button is hit, it fires right up. He got it running great. We try and keep a little black book of bike buyers. I had Josh email a few of them. One guy named Arne, who likes to buy Harleys from us, wanted it. Just one photo of that bike and it sold for $7500. I hated to sell the bike, but winter is cold here in Michigan and selling keeps the heat on! With the ‘77 off the lift and heading over the pond, we got Freight Train up on the lift. I told the guys to just clean it up and get it running. I didn’t think it would be a big deal or take too long, but after they got into the bike, they found a few issues that we needed to fix. First was the starter; it smoked when Josh tried to start it. Luckily, we not only buy bikes, but parts as well. I had one or two starters hanging around for just such an occasion. Once we got a good used starter on it, we had to make a new bracket to hold the starter to the 5 speed transmission. Then, we noticed that the inner primary was a little chewed up from the drive chain. We pulled the primary apart and installed a primary saver. While we were in there, I opted to put a pro-clutch instead of the stock clutch. Since this was a hot rod Shovel, those drag pipes wouldn’t do, but a Thunder header would! Lastly, a little bit of wiring made the bike run better than ever. I wanted to keep Freight Train so I had to find something to sell. As fate would have it, a guy walked into our shop with a running Shovel for sale. Terry had read about us in one of the greatest magazine on the market today! Yep, you guessed it, The Horse BC. He read that we buy and sell bikes. Terry was looking to possibly trade his Shovel for a bike with electric start because he couldn’t kick the bike any more. I had one bike left out of the nine Harleys I bought a few weeks earlier. It was a 1986 Softail custom. It was mostly stock, but it was fast. Terry loved the Softail and wanted to make a deal. His Shovel was cool, but it didn’t have a true Harley title which affects the value. It makes it harder to sell, because there is a smaller window of willing buyers. Then, Terry offered to throw in a parts bike he had too. Now when Terry said “parts bike,” I assumed it was a roller or some bike that wasn’t running. Nope. The “parts bike” was 4 boxes and a frame! That’s great. Like I said, we buy parts as well as bikes. I got Zeke started on selling the parts online. Meanwhile, Josh and I started cleaning up the old black Shovel. This bike consisted of pieces from many different years, but it had some really cool parts on it. The frame was a “drop link,” which would have had a pan in it. The front end was a true super glide with extended tubes. All that, combined with the chopper oil tank and the old pan stuff, made it a really cool bike. We decided to clean up parts like the saddlebag supports and an old horn. I thought a cool, king queen seat would look good on there. My friend, Dustin Themm had a Harley super glide swing arm seat lying around and it looks great on there. As we were working on the bike, an old customer, Mike came in. Josh started talking about all the cool parts on it. Mike called me the very next day to make a deal on it. I love buying old parts as much as I love buying motorcycles. I find that someone needs to uncover parts to put them back into the world of the chopper. I’m always telling Josh to save one or two parts from every bike or lot of parts we get. I was going through a shed out back, and little did I know, the guys have started to build a bike out of some of the parts we have saved over the last year. They had a pretty good start on a roller! I really like what they have going on. It really got me thinking, so coming soon: a buildup of a bike with all used parts from here at Boomers Bike Shop. I’m still thinking of a name for it so send us some ideas at BoomersBikeShop@yahoo.com!!
~Boomer