Usually these people aren't what we'd call "informed appreciators"; so their reaction doesn't mean as much as that of our worldwide peers, whose praise/critique really counts. That's why I stress submitting quality photos so much; to the extent that we have an archived article filled with pointers as to how good bike photos may best be achieved.
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Q: Can the internet also show us flaws and misrepresentations? A bike that isn't seen in the flesh by anyone other than the owner wouldn't need to be ridden, or for that matter be "well built" to get an impact on the World Wide Web. If the photography was good (or done right) the actual bike would only need to be a façade of the real thing, possibly fooling the viewer into believing it really had substance. Bikes like these could almost be called virtual bikes, meant as nothing more than an image to be placed on the internet, without having any true substance in reality. Could it ever make sense to give credence and "accolades" to a shoddily-made bike that only looks good as an image on a computer screen?  Does it matter if some bikes have no real substance, as long as they look good on the Net and inspire real builders to do better in their own work?
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A: That's a very timely question, John, since lately the "outing" of deceptively Photoshopped images has been a hot topic in the media. CBS' using Photoshop to slim down and beautify Katy Couric in an in-house publication made some waves, but the ethics are less violated than if it had been presented as a hard news photo. This was the case a bit earlier when an international news agency, Reuters, distributed a photo from Lebanon, which was so blatantly Photoshopped as to have been obviously produced as deceptive  propaganda, rather than the news photo it purported to be.

Unless it's done for purposes of fraud, such as removing flaws from a photo of something you're selling on eBay, for example, some touching-up is usually considered ethically valid. I have Photoshop, of course, and am fairly proficient at its use, but I commonly only use it on Gallery photos to improve the quality of the photo, not the bike itself. I've been known to remove a cigarette butt from the pavement adjacent to a bike's tire, for example, just because it would be a distraction to leave it in an otherwise good photo of a bike. Once, I touched-up some duct tape visible on the upholstery of an otherwise finished bike, by a serious builder, but I normally wouldn't bother to do that, because where do you stop, once you've started bending reality? That's why I stress sending in the best possible photos of bikes, because I won't fix them up for you. We have a policy of running our photos at the highest resolution and size a computer monitor can make use of, but even at that level, a lot of minor flaws are practically invisible.

To answer your question, John, it does matter if someone is doing shoddy work, but gets by because of the limitation of screen resolution to show flaws, or the builder's ability to retouch them out. But, that's why we push people to actually ride their bikes in public or enter them in shows. I can't say that nobody's ever submitted a photo to the Gallery with flaws digitally removed from the bike; but I'd certainly have caught one with radical "corrections".  At the moment, at least, that kind of fakery is not something we need worry about. Most people who are too lazy to do immaculate work on the actual bike are also too lazy to do digital retouching on their photos.

A: Do I? Hah! Stop me if you can!
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Yeah, I did some pretty crappy work when I was a kid, too. But I had aspirations to do better, and I worked at it. Now I'm capable of doing terrific work, so that's what I do. That's what Kustom is all about, isn't it? It's about people who have no particular "design credentials" training themselves to design and execute beautiful functional machines or whatever. Kustom is the ultimate in "low-brow/outsider" art, and I'm proud to have the chops down to call myself a decent Kustomizer. 
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If somebody deliberately sets out to build something uncreative, ugly and stupid, they aren't a kustom person, they're something else. I don't even care enough to think of a label to describe them, aside from maybe "loser" or "poser". Unless they do it as an "ironic statement", of course, and then I'd think of them as a "smacked ass", as they say in Philadelphia.
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That's my take on the term "Rat Bike" in its original usage. Like so many other recent moronic aspects creeping into our "movement" it comes from the motorcycle world. My first encounter with the concept was a couple of years ago at a site called Rat Bike Zone. In that context it's merely playing with the Mad Max fantasy theme as an excuse for avoiding craft discipline and the accompanying labor. What devotees of this school of "styling" don't recognize is that those fantasy movie vehicles were built by serious craftsmen like us, and were deliberately, at great expense, made to look like they were thrown together by neanderthals, just because of the visual theme of the films.
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For maybe the past year, the term has been cropping up frequently in regard to our sort of bicycles. Judging from the context of the mentions, there seem to be diverse definitions for the term. The most annoying and fallacious is that there are two kinds of Kustom bikes: "Show Bikes" and "Rat Bikes".  That one really pisses me off, as it insults genuine Kustom bikes built to be actually ridden on the street. That's exactly what we're about, isn't it? Or have we learned nothing from LRB history? Just because it isn't a dedicated  "Show Queen" doesn't mean we don't care about construction quality and beauty; and nobody'd better call one of mine an 'effin' "Rat Bike".
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If somebody wants to label those two types separately it should be "Street Kustoms" and "Show Kustoms". Just because someone chooses matte black for the paint or powder coat finish on their street bike doesn't mean that they've built a Rat Bike. This is especially so if they've done a nice job, followed by the application of some tasty pinstriping and other detailing on it, as exemplified by a Kustom Cruiser that joined our Gallery last issue. I told the builder (Troy Howell) that his bike was much too nice to be called a Rat Bike, but if that's what he wanted to call the thing I wasn't going to censor him- but the BR&K Gallery doesn't exist for the showcasing of actual Rat Bikes.
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What constitutes a "Rat Bike", in the original usage of the term, is if they applied flat black to the thing just because sloppy workmanship, if there was any actual work involved, doesn't show quite so obviously under that sort of finish, unlike gloss black, in which every blemish is accentuated. As far as I'm concerned, if you just spray some flat-black onto a thing because you're too damned lazy to scrape the decals off, you haven't built a bike, you've just whipped up a poser fashion accessory, and you should go somewhere else if you're looking for your kind of "movement". That isn't "kustom", by anyone's definition.
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We have a fair amount of pretty crude bikes made by kids in our Gallery, and as far as I can recall, none of them have labeled their work a "Rat Bike"; that's because they did their best and are proud of the accomplishment. It's only lazy poser adults who engage in that "ratbike" sophistry, as a pretext for not doing their best, or even their "so-so".  A real kustom bike, even for the street, is to a Rat Bike, as a bespoke suit is to a Wal-Mart Halloween costume.
know that striping was done with a special dagger brush, so I just used the little camel-hair brush I had for model painting, and Testors model enamel; and laboriously painted the striping on, without much line width variation, but following the Von Dutch style as much as possible.
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I rode that bike for several more years, and put a lot of miles on it; since we lived outside of town at that time, and that's the only way I could get around to see my friends, or hit the drugstore to check out the new hot rod magazines. I used it to regularly visit every auto junkyard within a ten-mile radius, in my search for the elusive "Deuce" roadster I wanted to base my future street rod on, but never found. I built up a terrific set of leg muscles, though, and I still have them. Of course, the rest of my body's gone to hell.
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Q: I had been thinking that someone like yourself (growing up in the 1950's) with "Hot Rod" and custom car magazines laying around the house must have got it in his head to make a hot rod "kustom" bicycle! That first kustom bike of yours is a good example of how kids got them made back then! Do you remember seeing other bicycles made in the 1950's that would have fit the bill as a true kustom bicycle, in the "George Barris Kustom" sense? Around what year do you think the first true kustom bicycles were consciously made?

A: I don't remember seeing any other kustom bikes around that time, even in the magazines. And my part of Kentucky didn't have car shows then. It may not even have them now, come to think of it. Louisville had an annual car show, but that was hundreds of miles away. I never attended it, so I can't say that there were or weren't kustom bikes displayed there. I would say that, as in your case, John, that car shows would have been the place for early kustom bike sightings. It's safe to assume that there are probably photos in shoeboxes out there in people's basements and attics.
I suppose I'm most proud of our role in retrieving George Barris' bicycle work for posterity. Hardly anyone until recently knew what those bikes represented, and there's no telling how many of his bikes have been saved from landfills or the parts donor pile just because someone was able to Google "Iverson bicycle" and find our database on the subject, and information on the legendary person behind it. We just got in a new set of photos of another, much better preserved, example of his "Adult Dragstripper" for our Barris bike archives, because someone about to put it on eBay Googled "Iverson Dragstripper" and found us.
Q: Or too scared! A Critical Mass Ride in New York is a guaranteed bust by the Authorities! They really have a "hate on" for organized pedal power, and treat it like it was an international criminal conspiracy! You have a point about how age relates to activism. Many North American kustomizers are on the plus side of 30, 40, and even 50! And are probably less inclined to be active in these causes.
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A: The situation in NYC is truly ridiculous; and the recent restrictions are not only draconian, but have been ruled unconstitutional when brought before judges. But the city's Republican Mayor and his Police Chief keep trying. Here's a link to the recent situation here. They've even been trying to criminalize groups of two or more activist pedestrians now! That was just tossed out by the courts.
CLocster, Germany
A: I think of traditional balloon and middleweight 24"-frame-based adult kustom bikes as "Pony Cruisers", and the form has a lot going for it, especially in the cramped urban cycling environment. They're almost as agile as 20" musclebikes, and don't take up much more room. My recent work has been mostly in the 26" long-wheelbase form, but my "Killer Swan" of a few years ago is a radically-styled Street Kustom based on a 24" girl's balloon frame. I built it for my daughter as a high-school graduation gift, and she's still turning heads in a "glamorous" way with it, although she's taller than I am now.
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My new personal city ride is a 7-foot-long chopper. While this is a foot shorter than Kandiru, my suburban ride in Baton Rouge, it's still pretty cumbersome for a bike requiring street access by elevator. Once I've grown tired of the hassle of wrestling with that scale, I have a 24" prewar frame waiting for the Kustom Cruiser treatment. Just adding rear dropout extensions and a 26" or longer fork allows this size frame to work with "adult-scale" wheels and tires, and it can be done entirely without welding, which is a big plus in an urban environment.
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Q: City living presents its own set of problems for the kustom bicycle builder, I live on the second floor of an old warehouse, and have to take my bikes down a winding flight of stairs to get them outside! The stairs were put in when the old freight elevator died, a sad day!
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Jim, tell us more about the kind of problems you have experienced, being a bicycle kustomizer in New York City, one of the largest and craziest urban environments in the world? It must present its own unique set of difficulties? What are you up against there?
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A: Lack of workspace has always been the worst problem. I'm basically a country boy, and I've always built things, following my father's example. When I was a kid, I had total access to my father's shop, I had a barn to store parts and raw materials, and I had my own shop building, an old wagon shed across the road, to use for building bikes and other vehicle projects.
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When I came to Manhattan in the late '70s, my having the ability to actually make things became an important part of the package I could offer to clients. It gave me an edge over most of my freelance Art Director competition. Anybody can think up crazy things, but it takes a rare set of skills to actually realize them and put them in front of a camera. By being able to do that part myself, I was able to take on projects that would have been too impractical or expensive for most of my competition to tackle, so I got the business.
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Q: Was it hard finding a suitable space when you first arrived in New York?
Schwinn Manta Ray
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Q:  Jim, "BikeRod&Kustom" has given the bike world a clear perspective on what creative cycling is all about. In the ten years before its inception in 1998 the world of kustom bike building was fragmented, the west coast lowriders being a visible (but insulated) example of what was going on at the time.

What were you hoping to accomplish with the creation of BR&K? The Internet was just beginning to make its mark in 1998, and was still a mystery to most people. Did you have any idea of just how influential the Internet would become, and how this influence would forever change the face of the kustom bicycle movement?
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A: As early as 1995, I could easily see that the web had tremendous potential as a worldwide grassroots information-sharing medium, from my experience as US Correspondent for the BugattiWeb, a networked entity of Bugatti fanciers and students formed by people in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the UK. Suddenly having a circle of friends and acquaintances all around the globe sharing a common interest in a fairly esoteric subject was quite an eye-opener for me.
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I kept running searches for a similar web entity to do with my sort of bicycle activity, with very little luck. At the time, the only extant alterna-bike presences were CHVNK 666 and a couple of lowrider bike sites, none of which were really my kind of thing. They were interesting,
and I could relate to them somewhat, but the CHVNK aesthetic was just too "ratty", and the ultimate LRB aesthetic was way too baroque and non-functional, even then.

.When I was considerably younger and growing up in rural Kentucky, I took it for granted that I was some kind of mutant; but by the mid-nineties I was reasonably sure that I couldn't possibly be the only guy in the world who was applying the hot rod and kustom aesthetic to bicycles; so I decided to start a site for myself and like-minded people who weren't content with merely buying and riding factory bikes, or meticulously restoring old ones. I assumed that my peers would discover the site, eventually.
Since my adolescence coincided with the birth and proliferation of the original hot rod and kustom car magazines, I wanted to recapture the spirit and excitement of that media, which had blown me away and literally changed my life back then. So, in addition to a Gallery, I wanted to concentrate on generating hot rod magazine-style content in a print-periodical-style form. Since I'd worked as a magazine designer and art director with earlier experience as a journalist, it was hardly a stretch for me.
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Q: So, the possibilities of the Internet became real and tangible for you? Even though the majority of the population wasn't hooked into it yet, you obviously understood its potential as a powerful communication tool.
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The kustom car magazines that people grew up with certainly set the mood for the future, true! But very few people ever entertained the idea they might be able to produce an actual magazine of their own.  In the 1990's methods used to transmit information were undergoing revolutionary change, and you saw the potential! The web gave you an opening, a voice!
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A: There's an old saying from the '60s about the media: "The power of the press belongs to the guy wealthy enough to own one". Even then, there were alternative media based upon cheap offset printing and Xerox; I explored them both, at the time. But the end product was less visually sophisticated and consequently considered "bush league" by most people. Publications done this way became known as 'Zines, to differentiate them from "Real Magazines".
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Easier-to-use, relatively-powerful home computers and the web, especially by the mid-'90s, made it possible for almost anyone with a personal computer to become a "publisher"- on the web, anyway, with a product as seemingly sophisticated as that of the "major players". And why not; after all, since the early-'90s, the major players were working with the same tools as the bush leaguers?  As publishing on the web was practically free at that time, I was good to go, with an "E-Zine".
Granted, at that time a lot of the people who had been actually doing our thing, like you, John, or who would be inclined to, were they only aware of the concept, like most of our current readership, hadn't become wired-up and computer-literate yet, so it was slow going at first. I really had to search hard to find practitioners and examples of their work for the first few issues. But it soon became easier as the word spread.
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Fred Hajny 1998:
McFall
Cruiser
Q: During the late 90's I only had access to the Internet by going to the local University library.  My Internet searches for creative cycling eventually brought me to "BikeRod&Kustom". I think I may have found it through a link on a non-kustom bicycle site.
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A: Fortunately, by being the only site dealing with our subject at that time, BR&K was a natural for inclusion in the links sections of all sorts of "straight" bike sites, after I'd sent them our URL. We certainly weren't competing with them, so we were treated as an interesting and amusing novelty site to share. Like an insidious virus, we caught on with a great many victims that way. Soon, lots of people in the "Roadie", MTB, BMX, and Classic-Restoration demographics felt the urge to try their hands at this offbeat and creative sub-set of cycling culture, because we made it look like gratifying fun. It seems to have caught on, eh?

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Q: "Caught on" isn't the half of it, you're right!  It's been truly amazing to see how kustom cycling has gone from "novelty" to "serious business" in the last few years. In the 1960s and '70s it was primarily a fun activity for children and teenagers; but things have really changed, haven't they? Do you have any theories on why kustom cycling in the "Internet age" is primarily an adult activity? What do you think the reasons are, and, how might this trend affect the future of the movement?
A: I think there are many small reasons for the shift in the age range of kustom bike practitioners in this cycle, rather than one large one.
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For one thing, kids today don't have as much free time as they used to. Their day-to-day lives are much more tightly scheduled than when I was a kid, and probably when you were, as well. Now they have all sorts of semi-compulsory "enrichment" activities, which didn't really exist in the past, for most kids. In theory, this makes them more well-rounded individuals, but it doesn't leave much room for the sort of maniacal specialization in one activity bike kustomization requires. When I was a kid, warm weather meant that you and your friends were out on your bikes or working on them when you weren't- period. There was nothing much else to do, and there were a maximum of three channels on TV, assuming your Mom would let you stay indoors to watch it in nice weather. And she usually didn't, because fresh air and sunshine were considered healthy for you back then. Also, the mass perception that there was a pedophile predator lurking around every neighborhood hadn't become so pervasive at that time.
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Q: It's not like when we were young is it? Seems like many children never play in the sunshine anymore! Cycling is an outdoor activity reserved for outdoor children! A rare breed these days in North America!

In today's two-income households you would think there would be more "fun" money available (for things like kustom bike stuff), but that probably isn't true either! What do you think, Jim, is money (the lack of it) a factor that keeps kids out of kustom biking?

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A: Expense is a big factor. It's true that kids have much higher discretionary "income" to spend now, but everything they buy costs more money than it did back in the day, and there is so much more expensive stuff out there that their peers expect them to own. I doubt that any pair of sneakers I ever wore as a kid cost more than $3.99, but that wouldn't pay for new laces for the hi-tech-style footwear today's kids are conditioned to desire through TV advertising. And hundred-dollar sneakers are just the most obvious example of a
pervasive trend. When you factor in that bike parts, especially kustom-styled ones, have also become relatively more pricey than they were during the '60s and '70s, it's not surprising that only a small minority of kids choose to buy them, rather than other, more culturally-mandated expensive goods.

The earlier "golden age" of bike kustomization was driven by cheap prices, because the "youth bike" market was traditionally viewed by marketers as a part of the toy business. Back in the day, toys were considerably cheaper than adult goods; today there's hardly any difference, except in the pricing of the basic bike. A cheap kid's bike costs about half what a cheap adult bike costs. But, from that point on, there's not much of a price differential for the parts and accessories.
I was in college when the earlier "golden age" was going on, and I owned cheap old cars and motorcycles most of that time. But I was unable to resist the availability of cheap kustom-style bike parts in all the stores, even those in small towns like mine. So I built up a kustom musclebike one summer in the late '60s, just for the hell of it, based on an old sidewalk bike my brother Dave outgrew, which was still in our barn. I can't imagine a kid back then being able to resist the allure of all those mix-and-match bolt-on goodies, especially since a bike was so much more central a part of leisure activities for most suburban and rural kids.
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Even a total frame-up build was cheaper back then, since the donor frames were so common, and usually free. BroDave's old kiddy sidewalk bike had the identical 20" cantilever frame Schwinn based their Stingrays and Krates upon. And in the '80s when the lowrider bike kids were starting their movement, common trash bikes were often superficially-worn-out Stingrays and Krates.
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Q: Yes, after all the baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1962) came of age their old bikes wound up in the garbage! You and I are part of this demographic, and (as a group) we still carry a big stick! I was born in 1960, the year (I'm told) that had the highest number of births.

There were a lot of kids and bikes around during this boomer time.  I for one took advantage of the situation, and grabbed every thrown-out frame, sissy bar, handlebar or any other bike part I could get my hands on! I wasn't alone in treasure hunting either; lots of kids were doing the same thing! I knew guys who had virtually filled their parents garages with bikes and parts they had found on trash day!  Any bike part you needed could be had for free at the curbside, generally. Good stuff too!

A: Actually, John, I'm not a baby-boomer. I was born in 1944, which makes me a "war baby".  In the year of my birth, the most popular joke in Japan was a riddle: "What's the difference between an American baby and a bowling ball? Try tossing a bowling ball with your bayonet!"
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It was a world of peril for an American baby back then, John; and me with no defensive weapon except what I could carry in my diapers. Maybe that's why I still tend to fling crap around?
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Q: You're doing a very good job of it right now! Those last few lines of yours left nothing to the imagination! Since you've brought up the subject of crap, damn! Maybe it's a subject best left for another day.
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A: Speaking of crap, in a consumption-driven economy, there'll always be lots of trash bikes available, and I also gathered some great trash bikes and parts back in the day, but probably not as much as you accumulated, since I was out in the sticks.
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Today's trash bike frames are mostly pseudo-BMX and MTB, which lack the intrinsic curvilinear elegance of the previous generations of trash bikes. They just don't lend themselves very well to kustomization. They're still very useful for chopping up for bits and pieces, of course; but today's kids don't have access to the relatively sophisticated "Dad's Tools" most of my generation of kids had available, because do-it-yourselfer Dads aren't nearly as common as they used to be. Come to think of it, Dads of any kind aren't as common around the house as they used to be, in today's higher percentage of single-parent households. Typically, "Mom's Tools" fit comfortably in a kitchen cabinet drawer, and probably so do Dad's, if his "single-guy crib" even has a kitchen.
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I'd briefly hoped that the mass-produced "factory chopper" trend would lead to a new resurgence of kid kustomizers; but market trends today, thanks to modern media, have the life span of fruit flies. Back in that previous "golden age", every bike manufacturer jumped on that trend and rode it until the tires fell off- approximately ten years. This go-round, though, there wasn't time enough for that to happen, before marketers gave up on it. And most of the "me too" chopper bicycle production resulting from the start of the trend went directly to the Odd-Lot closeout stores from the importers' warehouses. Where they were bought up by adults like us, for use as raw material for our builds. By the time what's left over ends up in our trash, you could maybe make a really sturdy bong out of it, presuming you had the tools.
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Q: The new Stingray craze sure didn't last long did it? A lot of people thought that it was the end of the world when the factories stopped producing their kiddy choppers! But, when the smoke cleared, everyone could see that the movement had just carried on!
Half the problem was that young bike owners preferred the ride of a rusty BMX bike, to the "boat anchor" performance of a factory chopper. BikeRod&Kustom works at promoting the scene as a creative outlet for young people, not always an easy thing to do, but still, I think it's an uphill battle worth pursuing.

A: An important driving concept behind the founding of BR&K was to give "messing around with bikes and making them look really cool" a veneer of hipness and glamour necessary for any trend to take hold with kids and the media (pretty much the same mentality now). Unfortunately, within the current media zeitgeist concerning cycling, glamour is the strict provenance of the "sporting" aspects of cycling, and cutting-edge hipness is confined to the "X-games" subset of that aspect. And what do the bikes used in those activities look like?
I'd love to think otherwise, but it seems highly unlikely to me that there'll ever be a reprise of the mass youth bike kustom culture you grew up within, John; there are just too many factors working against it. That said, though, there will always be a certain percentage of mutant youth who fall into messing around with bikes the way we did, whether it's fashionable or not. Every once in a while, I get in a photo from some kid who found a bike in the trash and started messing around with it. As long as there's a BR&K, that kid will be able to see his work in our Gallery, and impress his friends with his "fame".

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Q: One curious thing I've noticed lately is that the scene has attracted more participants with strong political beliefs. Pedal power generally is drawing in more people who possess strong activist leanings (Critical Mass). Many European kustomizers especially seem to identify with the "Anti-War" and "Anti Big-Oil" movements.
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Increasingly (in some circles) kustom bicycle ownership is becoming a strong outward sign of very deep political views! I wonder what it is about the look and history of kustom bikes that makes them attractive for this purpose? "The Kustom bicycle as a political statement!" This is quite a development, if it's true! Any thoughts, Jim?
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A: After a certain age (usually around 18) people who are active cyclists tend to be more intelligent than the common herd of humanity; and our kind of cyclists tend to be more individualistic and creative than the cycling community in general. It takes a certain personality type to dare to scrape off the corporate decals and create a bicycle in their own style.
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This type of person will tend to not worship at the common altar, and be much more skeptical of "received wisdom" from the establishment. They have no illusions about the motivations of global corporations and their lap-dog politicians, and tend toward a more "progressive" viewpoint.
That said, even our kind of "alterna-cyclists", after a certain age (about 25, usually) have stopped equating climbing onto a bike saddle for a Critical Mass Ride with strapping on an AK47 for some "direct political action against the hegemony of oppression" or whatever.   People older than that, while they may totally agree with those sentiments and attitudes, tend to be too busy or lazy to actually "take it to the streets". Even on their kustom bikes.
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Q: Uniformity is a word that very much equates to what was happening in the late 90's just before the days of BR&K. The lowrider movement then (as it is now) was not really about style experimentation! It was about achieving a preordained look, with variance from basic styling rules being frowned upon. The forks were all the same, the frames were invariably Schwinn Stingray, and seats were all basically one shape too! The look was predetermined, and the attitude could be bought off a store shelf! Paint and the type of plating were up to the owner, but the basic look did not evolve or change very much at all.
"Kustom Cruisers" of the 90's (on the other hand) had it a little better! Cruisers didn't start off with the heavy rule limitations that seemed to be keeping the lowriders in a tight styling "box". Even though most of the early cruisers were based around standard cantilever frames, lack of rules soon brought a push to experimentation. Jim, what are your memories of how the Kustom Cruiser scene evolved?
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A: Even before BR&K started up, the "California Beach Cruiser" scene was an important West Coast trend, and was responsible for the term "Cruiser" becoming part of our lexicon. It had everything going on which is happening now; including work being done by
some of the surviving names from the golden age of hot rodding and kustom car building. That's when Moon started offering its classic spun-aluminum discs for 26" bicycle wheels. We adopted the term Kustom Cruiser when the style spread to places lacking beaches.
In our early Kustom Cruiser days, we had very few choices available in non-standard bike components, especially wheels. In consequence, almost every halfway-serious kustom cruiser wore 144-spoke lowrider wheels, as that was the only alternative. Throw in ape or half-moon bars, Schwinn-style springer fork, and a saddle from Brooks or the lowrider bike parts catalog, and you'd end up with something differing only in paint, graphics, and minor detailing from almost every other example of the breed. That almost everybody's favorite basis was the 26" Schwinn cantilever frame made this even more so.
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Larry Fator's 1970s Beach Cruiser,
Tank by Jocko Johnson
Thanks to the influence of people like Brad Graham, Mike Watson, and other radical reworkers of the bike frame showing the way with their tallbikes and even crazier creations, advanced kustomizers took their next step, by taking up hacksaws and torches and using them to create some seriously modified Kustom Cruisers. Stretching, exemplified by Ken Russell's work, was an obvious thing to do, and resulted in a whole new theme to explore. The GT/Dyno Roadster followed this new trend, and the factory stretch cruiser resulted. People who'd been building up Kustom Cruisers but weren't yet ready to tackle radical frame reworking jumped at the opportunity to work with the new Cruiser proportion. This was the turning point, and that's when kustom bikes became much less uniform, for a while, at least.
Q: Cruisers have incredible potential, I personally feel we are on the edge of a new era for this type of bicycle, and with it will come some radical experimentation! We have already caught a glimpse of this happening in some of the new "Latin Cruisers" seen in California. These bikes seem to take some of their styling cues from the lowrider movement; but with less of the clutter and tackiness. They are probably being built by former lowrider builders looking for a little
more styling freedom, and some new territory to conquer! I'm expecting Latin cruisers to go the limit with frame design, and bodywork.

.A: One of our earliest Contributing Editors, Larry Lujan, was pretty much the founding father of that school. He was a serious lowrider bike builder in his youth; but when he became older, with kids of his own, he saw that the LRB movement was sinking into non-functional and expensive irrelevance. So he began evangelicizing for street-worthy kustom-style bicycle building to the kids, based on the more practical 26" Cruiser platform. The current leading LC practitioners, in many instances, are LA neighborhood kids he personally mentored in the late '90s.
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Ken Russell
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Larry Lujan and son.
Q: Jim, you've had quite a bit of experience with your own breed of kustom cruisers in the last few years. What are your personal thoughts about where this new cruiser scene might be going? Can function play as much a part as the form will, and where should we expect to see the first glimpse of something big starting to happen?
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A: Function has always been a big aspect of cruisers. While they aren't as spectacular as other types emerging since our beginnings,
they have a lot going for them in relation to practicality. They don't take up a lot of space, and riding one is fairly straightforward, with nothing too weird about their operation. It's difficult to make one really stand out, in a tasteful way, though, due to the limitations of surface area. "Tank paneling" is a good way of adding more "canvas" for creative graphics, so you can expect to see more of that being done. Larry Lujan was doing that a long time ago. I also think there's a lot of potential for downsizing the cruiser somewhat, by basing kustoms on the 24"-sized frame.
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Traditionally, John, there was a broader range of bike sizes commonly available. Little kids started with 20"-tire based street bikes, progressed to the 24" size in adolescence, then graduated to 26" in their teens. During your youth, the 20" size pretty much wiped out the 24" size, since the musclebike-style seating and handlebar configuration allowed larger riders to use the dinky 20" frames.
Q: Yes, it was "Schwinn" that hopped on the corporate bandwagon with that in mid 1963! They had heard about an emerging trend for bikes that was started by some California kids, back in around 1961 or so! These kids had been kustomizing old 20-inch framed bikes by bolting on aftermarket "Solo Polo" seats, and "high rise" handlebars!  Schwinn realized there might be sales potential for this new look and style, and so, introduced its own factory version as part of the '63 mid-year lineup. This was of course the bike they called the "Stingray"! They took a chance that the kids in California were on to something, and the rest is history.
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One of the first ratty choppers that I made back in 1972-73 was built around an ancient Schwinn with 24x2.125 tires on it! Even then I thought that the 24-inch tire size was perfect! I even found some old English motorcycle fenders in the trash that mated up to them perfectly.
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A: I've always liked the 24" balloon and middleweight frames because of their compact size- about the scale of a small-displacement motorcycle. By using some of the more recently developed tricks and components, it's possible for a full-scale rider to use this size frame in a very sophisticated-looking way, without the "circus bear" image the smaller 20"-tired musclebike or chopper conveys. Speaking of which, that clownish image was responsible for the 24" Schwinn Manta Ray's introduction, back in the day.
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Schwinn Manta Ray
Q: The only thing that I really liked from the early 70's Schwinn "Manta Ray" was the seat, which was shaped like no other banana seat before or since! I bought one of these seats brand new in 1973, and it eventually wound up on my first show bike. The 24-inch "Manta Ray" went looking for an older audience in the early 70's, but it didn't find one. Today things have come full circle, and the 24-inch size is right at home again!
A: I think of traditional balloon and middleweight 24"-frame-based adult kustom bikes as "Pony Cruisers", and the form has a lot going for it, especially in the cramped urban cycling environment. They're almost as agile as 20" musclebikes, and don't take up much more room. My recent work has been mostly in the 26" long-wheelbase form, but my "Killer Swan" of a few years ago is a radically-styled Street Kustom based on a 24" girl's balloon frame. I built it for my daughter as a high-school graduation gift, and she's still turning heads in a "glamorous" way with it, although she's taller than I am now.
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My new personal city ride is a 7-foot-long chopper. While this is a foot shorter than Kandiru, my suburban ride in Baton Rouge, it's still pretty cumbersome for a bike requiring street access by elevator. Once I've grown tired of the hassle of wrestling with that scale, I have a 24" prewar frame waiting for the Kustom Cruiser treatment. Just adding rear dropout extensions and a 26" or longer fork allows this size frame to work with "adult-scale" wheels and tires, and it can be done entirely without welding, which is a big plus in an urban environment.
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Q: City living presents its own set of problems for the kustom bicycle builder, I live on the second floor of an old warehouse, and have to take my bikes down a winding flight of stairs to get them outside! The stairs were put in when the old freight elevator died, a sad day!
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Jim, tell us more about the kind of problems you have experienced, being a bicycle kustomizer in New York City, one of the largest and craziest urban environments in the world? It must present its own unique set of difficulties? What are you up against there?
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A: Lack of workspace has always been the worst problem. I'm basically a country boy, and I've always built things, following my father's example. When I was a kid, I had total access to my father's shop, I had a barn to store parts and raw materials, and I had my own shop building, an old wagon shed across the road, to use for building bikes and other vehicle projects.
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When I came to Manhattan in the late '70s, my having the ability to actually make things became an important part of the package I could offer to clients. It gave me an edge over mo