Engraved

Sturgis Motor Museum Hall of Famer Mark Shadley rolls out another stunner.

- Doc

Boston John, the owner of this mega sweet custom told builder Mark Shadley that he wanted “apes” and also “to be involved in the build”. Then they went to lunch. After which, he said to Mark, “I still want the apes but the rest is up to you.”

So Mark decided that he would build a rigid, with paint graphics that would give it the look of an East LA bike.

As you can see, just about every single thing that has not been painted, has been engraved and while I won’t share the cost of the engraving, I can say that it is worth more than most people spend buying a new Harley-Davidson.

However, Mark did say I could reveal the total cost of the build, which was a lazy USD$75,000 – an amount that currently converts to a touch over $105,000 in Aussie dollars. Whoa.

Now you might be thinking “a hundred grand for a rigid? When did sanity leave the building?” But you’d be wrong.

​During the photo shoot I crawled all over this bike, peering closely at stunning detail after stunning detail – blown away by one after the other.

And if you have ever had a bike built, you well know that precision engineering does not come cheap.

We’ve featured quite a number of Shadley Bros builds in these pages over the years, including their Gold Rush bike that ran in our previous issue (#163).

Situated in Whitman, Massachusetts, these guys are craftsmen of the highest calibre and have been building magnificent customs for some three decades now, pulling many top shelf awards along the way. As I understand it, Mark is responsible for the majority of this build, but for convenience sake – and given that some products are Shadley Bros proprietary shop products – I won’t allocate the credit to each and every item.