If you truly want to customize your bike without spending a small fortune and ending up with a bike that looks like everyone else’s you have to learn the right places to buy parts for custom motorcycles. Whether you own a metric bike or a custom Harley, it is very easy to get caught up in customizing your bike without much thought to whether you’re spending too much money or if you’re getting the best parts for your bike.

Sometimes the best parts can be found at Dennis Kirk or Cruiser Customizing, or even J and P Cycles, but often times the parts you really want aren’t to be found there. Hard to find gems in the custom motorcycle parts business are everywhere yet really hard for most people to find.  I’m here to help you look.

OK. You’re number one friend in hunt for custom bike parts is Google. But you’re going to have to learn to move beyond page one of the search results. In the past I have found many unique parts for my bike by simply typing in the bike model into the search engine and going page after page through the result. If you’re too specific about what you are looking for often times the way search engines rank sites can work to your disadvantage.

This is one of those times where a broad search works best. Here’s a tip: bookmark each and every site that may be of interest. It is really easy to come across a cool custom bike part maker only to not be able to find them again.

Directories are your friends. I say that not just because I own one, but because they have already done the work for you. Hunt down sites that list custom bike part websites. This will save you countless hours of searching. On my site I list a lot of website that I have found in magazines, sites that you will never come across in regular search results because the search engines just don’t know about them.

One of the best sources of custom parts is custom motorcycle builders themselves. Almost every custom bike builder makes custom parts that they sell direct. These are parts you are never going to find on those large motorcycle parts websites or even at your local bike rally. A great place to find parts if you’re looking to have a unique bike. Do broad searches like “Custom Softtail” or “Custom V-star”.  You are bound to come across a bike builder who is making some of his own parts.

Ebay is a great source of custom motorcycle parts at discount prices but be wary. Many sellers are selling parts that look similar to the ones you have seen on other more expensive websites but may be of a seriously inferior quality. I have had much success on Ebay both buying and selling slightly used as well as new parts. Often time guys will customize a bike but a few hundred or thousand miles on it and then completely change the theme and resell the parts they no longer need.  You can pick up exhausts and chrome covers for half of retail here.

One last thought: if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for wait a little while and try searching for it again rather than settle for something close. Many times I have come across exactly what I wanted right after buying something else that was close.  After all it’s your custom motorcycle, why should you settle for less than perfection?

Is it strictly a male thing? Doesn’t seem to be as far as I can tell. Many women immediately start customizing their motorcycles as soon as they get them. So I guess that would rule out any mating ritual psycho babble arguments as to why we can’t be satisfied with what we have. The motorcycle as an extension of our manhood doesn’t explain why females also customize bikes. And we know they do.

I notice that it’s a very rare motorcycle owner that doesn’t do at least a little customizing to their machine even if it’s only adding a few chrome parts or covers on, so maybe the reason we make custom motorcycles is closely related to the reasons we ride bikes at all. Is what makes us bikers in the first place also what drives us to change them as soon as we get them? I think it may be.

For most of us, riding a motorcycle is about our individuality, our ability to separate ourselves from the rest of the world and to some degree control our own world. When you ride a bike you’re in control of your very life: every decision you make could be a life or death one.  I think that for most riders that is what we love about riding more than anything, the sense of control. And we extend that feeling onto what our motorcycles look like. By customizing our motorcycle we can assert our individuality in the bike itself. And it’s easy to accomplish. Go to any bike rally and try and find two identical motorcycles. It is next to impossible.

We build custom motorcycles so we can say to the world “Hey, I don’t care how much I blend into the background at work, or at the mall or when I driving my car; when I’m on this one of a kind motorcycle my individuality can’t be ignored. I’m different from everyone else, even other motorcyclists.  We build custom bikes so we can stand back look at our bike and say “No one else in the entire world owns a motorcycle that looks like this.” We build custom motorcycles because we want something that shows our uniqueness.

Some of us may even build them for the sheer joy that comes from accomplishment, but ultimately we still want others to see them because it makes us unique. No one ever built a custom bike and then hid it in the garage. Like any form of art, it; and its builder, can’t be appreciated unless it’s put on display. In a world where people have become assets and numbers the custom motorcycle still screams “I will not be who the world thinks I should be!”

No one knows who exactly built the first choppers, but it is generally agreed upon that they were built by soldiers returning home from WWII. Soldiers who had ridden bikes inEuropefound that the Harleys being produced in theUSwere slow and bulky, something that is still true today.

In an effort to lighten these bikes up the riders started to remove unnecessary parts and “bob” the fenders. Had the European motorcycles been readily available inAmericaI believe that these bikers might have abandoned Harley right then and we would have a completely different biker scene than what we have today.

These early modified bikes were called Bobbers and the term Choppers actually didn’t get popular until the sixties and early seventies. Most sources reference the movie Easy Rider as the start of the cultural phenomena, but national news about the antics of the Hells Angels certainly had the image of the biker outlaw already fixed in the public’s eye, a much badder version than we saw in the movie The Wild One from 1953.

The new generation that was chopping bikes made their own style by not just bobbing the bikes but by adding additional rake and longer front ends and of course the obligatory sissy bar. The bikes we know as choppers were born. I think it’s interesting that even though the two terms “bobber” and “chopper” became distinct 40 years ago they are now being used interchangeably, mostly by people who don’t really understand the terms at all.

The choppers of the late sixties went from just being bobbed Harleys with no turn signals and mirrors to being also modified bikes with ape hanger handle bars, like Sonny Barger was using back in the late 50′s, skinny front tires and the already mentioned sissy bar. Now we were no longer just removing unnecessary parts but were also adding a few touches of our own. Back then there were no “custom bike builders” and most of the work was being done in the rider’s own garage. As we went into the seventies, builders began to get really creative and the bike as a form of art was born.

Artist David Mann captured the entire chopper lifestyle in his work, and builders actually tried to now build bikes based on Mann’s more extreme artistic interpretations of what choppers could look like. The bikes that Dave imagined soon came into actually being. The seventies were definitely made for custom bikes.

Interest in motorcycles kind of fizzled out around during the 80′s when young people were more interested in building muscle cars out of models from the late sixties and seventies than they were in motorcycles. At the same time a lot of riders were converting to Japanese sport bikes and moving away from the Harley scene and any choppers you did see just seemed like relics from a bygone era. The biker scene didn’t go away by any means, but it definitely went underground as far as the general population was concerned.

Of course, everything we know today about custom motorcycle building as been brought about by cable TV trying to fill the dead air with stories about anything they could and the first show done about Jesse James was never intended to turn into a new television genre, but it did. The well-to-do suddenly decided they needed a custom bike and not knowing any of the history of motorcycles they immediately started calling every custom motorcycle a chopper, even though by definition it wasn’t. In fact the bikes made popular by builders not on TV were usually more in the style ofPro Streetmotorcycles that were run on the drag tracks then by anything that resembled a true chopper, with a few notable exceptions.

As the desire for custom bikes and motorcycles in general bloomed in more middle class citizens, these new riders were more likely to take the time and understand their bikes, many of which had to learn to work on them out of pure necessity, like the original bikers did. Motorcycles and custom bikes became an acceptable form of fun for everyone and the image of the outlaw biker as been converted into the lawyer or plumber biker.

Even though we still have some real choppers being built, the true meaning of the word has probably been lost forever, but not the spirit of those that built them. As custom bikes go out of style we’re left with a very large core group of new riders who will now ride the rest of their lives, and many of them will be also building choppers.

The boost the custom motorcycle business received from the television show created around a group of guys who built custom choppers rivaled the dot com craze in the late nineties as far as the swell of new companies entering the business. As with any artificially created demand, eventually consumers came back to reality and many of the newly created motorcycle shops were forced to close their doors.

Once an almost completely underground market, the interest that was generated in those who would normally not be interested in choppers also propelled small companies into huge success and created an internet niche that has remained as large as it was during the custom motorcycle craze. Since websites are much less expensive to maintain than brick and mortar businesses, the economic slump did little to affect the huge number of websites that were built around custom motorcycles.

The question now is whether or not the business of building choppers can survive through this recession with only magazine ads and internet buzz to keep it a float. I would suspect many small shops that are barely hanging on will close their doors before the end of the year. Some may simply turn back into one man operations that can no longer afford a crew of bike builders.

The good news for hands on builders is that each one only needs to produce 5 or 6 choppers a year to keep their heads above water. And the few customers looking for choppers in these tough times are also the sort to not search for bargains as much as getting the bike they really want. Most blue collar workers, the type that were stretching their budgets to get into their own custom bikes when times were good are certainly not going to risk their families financial future on a $30,000 toy.

So this really leaves only the well to do and bikers as potential buyers of custom bikes in general. I believe the average Joes will come back to buying choppers but not until this economic slump is truly over and Americans are no longer afraid to spend money again. But we have certainly seen the heyday of the custom chopper industry. There’s just simply no way it will be what it was during the American Chopper craze.

Probably more than half of those that bought custom bikes just because of the show have already traded them in on more practical motorcycles, if they’re even still riding. When times got tough many just couldn’t justify keeping something in the garage for an occasional ride that was worth more than a lot of Americans make in a year.

While there is future for choppers, it isn’t going to look anything like the recent past.

Since I spend a good portion of my time reviewing and researching the world of custom motorcycles, I thought it might be fun to list my own top ten for the custom motorcycle world. My choices were made strictly on the quality and originality of their work and not how famous they are.  Here they are in reverse order.

10. OCC Choppers – Six months ago these guys wouldn’t have even made my short list, let alone my top ten, but since Paul Jr. left, the bikes they’re building have been better than ever. The OCC band bike alone earns them a spot on the list.

9. Bobber Shop – The one inThousand Oaks,CA. If you want to see how to properly take a stock Harley Davidson and turn it into a true custom you need to see the work these guys do. One of the best customizing shops in the country.

8.  Greg’s Custom Cycles -  I’m not sure where Greg gets his ideas but I hope they keep coming. One of the most creative bike builders in the country yet smart enough to never over do it. A bike done by Greg’s will truly be one of a kind.

7. Sam Nehme -  Roadstar customizer extraordinaire, Sam’s BMS Choppers continually keeps pumping out high quality custom Yamahas. I credit Sam for making customized Metric bikes an acceptable form of transportation.

6. ArlenNess– The guy’s an artist. He’s a legend. Arlen has pushed the boundaries of custom bike design further than any single individual I can think of. Many of Arlen’s unique ideas have made their way onto stock bikes. A real pioneer.

5. Mondo – After taking overDenver’s Choppers from the late Denver Mullins, Mondo has carved himself a place in motorcycle history, I feel, by being one of the most versatile custom motorcycle builders around. Mondo is one of the few builders that understand every style of bike and what makes it what it is.

4. Cole Foster – I once wrote that Cole’s picture should be put into the dictionary next to the world “cool”. That’s not a joke. This guy epitomizes cool and all that it means. While some may argue that Foster and his Salinas Boys haven’t built enough motorcycles to qualify for a spot this high on the list, my response is that it’s quality, not quantity that matters.

3. Roland Sands – Hello, next generation of custom bike builder. Roland can’t seem to decide if he wants to build a racing bike, a sport bike, a cruiser or and off road bike, so he just builds them all in every bike. Probably the most talented artist in the entire custom motorcycle world, Sands has truly created his own signature style.

2. Wicked Custom Cycles – Who? You may ask are they? Well, do yourself a favor and Google them and you’ll find out. My number two choice was selected for their unique take on the V-star 1100 as a base for a custom motorcycle. They are without a doubt building the finest metric bikes I have seen yet. Look these guys up.

1.  Redneck Engineering -. The heart of a custom motorcycle is not in the engine but rather the frame. Redneck has taken frame design to its ultimate perfection. They have developed new frame styles that other bike builders are falling over themselves to use. The Redneck style is instantly recognizable, no matter who has done the finishing work, and I can not wait to see what they develop next.

Like it or not, that’s my top ten list for custom motorcycle builders. Hopefully I’ve given you something to think about and you’ll check out any of the builders that you haven’t heard about before. Thanks for reading.