Goldmember is part of the collection of Richard Guy Briggs, who also owns other Mike Watson creations. Amazingly enough, the bike was stolen. Why anyone would steal something as instantly recognizable as this is obviously a sign of  mental derangement or stupidity. The latter is probably closer to the mark, as Richard was easily able to track down the stolen bike, along with  other plunder, since the thieves chose to steal it on a snowy day, allowing Richard to trace its path to where it was badly concealed in a nearby back yard. The complete story is here.
awkward. There's 30 inches between the bottom brackets just in case I want to put the seat up and get on the front.
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Special thanks to Mark at Alcon Welding Small Engine Repair and CNC Machining for doing the welding and getting it exactly to specs and dead straight. It was something like jigging up an I.U.D. for a blue whale! Check out the Alcon site at http://www.alconshop.com
No project is too twisted for Mark to wrap his head around. Thanks again, Mark: the kids are having a blast!
Left: This is my version of the Keith Moss LWB  landspeeder. I'm still working on the adjustable back rest. It feels kind of fast as is, but I'll know for sure when I take it on the 9- mile commute to work, when it's complete. It's got a bit of "Phat" in it as, when I assembled Scotty's Chopper, he's so length-challenged in the leg I had to cut 3 inches off the seat post so he could touch the ground flat-footed. I used the 1 1/4 inch-diameter piece of scrap to join the chainstay stubs to the lower extended tail of the bike.
Portfolio: Michael Watson
Left: Tallbike1 is based on a freestyle frame; extending the front triangle 8.5 inches. This I did for comfort to suit my height. I extended the front forks two feet and beefed up the unicrown with an added center tube and a bridge and two short tubes bracing between the bridge and the curves at the crown. The back of the frame was jacked up two feet using another BMX frame.  It's a little spooky riding in snow when forward progress is slowed and the front wheel gets that surfy feeling.
Left: Tallbike number 2: the ultimate sport utility of bicycles.  Mountain bike wheels, 18 speeds, with a pseudo suspension fork, it has flex stops front and back to cope with the flex big bumps and putting the front brake on hard causes.  The fork is also a triple tree with a three hole plate across the top held down by the head set nut, short sections of tubing are used to brace things up. The key to tallbike operation is the mounting pegs about 22 inches off the the ground.  The mounting procedure is both hands on the grips, stand on the left side of the bike away from nasty chain rings, right foot up on the peg, two or so hops and pull yourself up, stand on the left pedal which was placed in the 9 o'clock position to drive the bike forward, swinging right leg over the top tube of frame and right foot on the pedal, sit on the seat: you are now freaking people out!
Left: This chopper is based  on a '71 CCM Mustang frame (sold by Canadian Tire under the name Super Cycle).  The front end was lengthened using a girl's BMX front section inverted, over a foot.  The front fork length was determined by what was required for a bottom bracket height, wanted to use 6 ½ inch crank instead of the stock 4 ½ inches.  The bottom bracket height is 12 ½ inches, more than enough. I hate hooking pedals on the ground.  For the fork, I wanted something that wouldn't bounce when I'm standing on the pedals.  BMX forks tend to be weakest at the unicrown bends,
so I built a triple on the fork by adding two tubes on the top of the unicrown bends and a plate on top with three holes to unify the steerer and the two tubes on each side, which braces the fork.  Adding more beefiness is a 1 3/8 tube below the steerer ending at the brake bridge and some cross bracing along the way.  A pretty stiff fork. The three speed hub is shifted using a suicide stick on the extended down tube, the handle was made from a section of broom stick and a rubber grip.  The seat post was lengthened and has an adjustable lean- ahead section to mount the seat with a T at the back with two sissybar pinch units with four bolts tapped in.  The sissybar pad was built by a buddy of mine I gave him a beater mountain bike for it. The finish is Chrysler 'mini van red' on powder white primer; other parts are gold lacquer. Everything was sand blasted down to bare metal before painting. I bit the bullet and bought new Kenda freestyle 1.95" tires for both ends for an easy roll.  I can pull some good wheelies in 1st and 2nd gears.
Left: "Crusty the Rat Lowrider" is based on a Raleigh BMX frame.  12-inch wheel on the front with a cut-down fork.  Built a layback-seat post, braced with band-steel connected from seat hardware to the back axle.  The back axle has standing platforms.  The giant ape- hanger bar was made from a high-riser bar extended and braced with furniture tubes that I salvaged.  The mirrors are tapped into the bars.  The front end has been dropped 8 ½ inches and the bottom bracket was lowered so much I had to use 5 ½ inch cranks with a 32-tooth chain wheel.  Handling is surprisely good, but razor-sharp, due to the 82-degree head angle: a little spooky though.  Brake levers are old, under- the-grip-mount-two-finger-MX levers.
Left: I just cooked up a kiddie's chopper with 16-inch wheels and a chopped frame.  All the cutting and filleting was done  with a hand grinder.  The front center is forty inches, chainstays 11 ½ inches.  The slack head angle is bound to develop massive upper-body strength in the pilot.  Soon to be painted.
Left: The double-front-wheel trike is a trike you can pull a wheelie on.  It has lots of traction on ice because of 13-inch chain stays and a 16"wheel.  The only problem with the design is that the more weight is on back, the lighter the front end is, and tippier the trike is.
On pavement, I can bank it around corners like a bike, or hang out the inside of turns like on an old skidoo.  The double front wheel required an Ackermann linkage because the inside wheel on turns has a smaller turning radius than the outside.  No spherical rod ends were used, only holes in flat plate with nylon washers and bolts, in the steering linkage.
Left: Phat 'n Tall
This summer I holidayed down east. I gave Liam Hayes a call, of "The Chopper Club" fame. We corresponded via e-mail in the months before. I found it interesting actually meeting the guy. Liam's a distributor for Phat Cycles, and has a trick yellow 747 Phat Cycles Chopper with a triple-tree fork, drum brakes front and back, with a 7-speed hub. Liam lent me the 747 on our ride around Halifax during the Tall Ship festival. Liam rode a CCM home-built chopper. Liam can climb the hills of Halifax like a goat, in spite of being seated very low on a banana seat, of all things. I had a little trouble keeping up, being a semi-fat boy, even though I had 7-speeds. I found  the 747 an interesting bike, I didn't need any adjustment period
to get used to the handling: a good thing since we rolled off the sidewalk at Liam's house and were screaming down the 15% grade to the waterfront. I really was screaming to vent a little panic!
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That was the only time I touched a bike on the two week holiday, it primed the creative process. I got inspired to do a tallbike version of a Phat-style chopper. I settled on the dropped extended frame with two head tubes with a 7/8 inch rod connecting the two steerer tubes. The frame has 24-inch chainstays, as the crow flies. The bike has 18 speeds,
a 14-34 tooth Suntour cluster and a 48-40-28-tooth triple. the chopper rides like a Cadillac. It took some time to get the different muscles in condition to ride in the laidback position; now I cruise about as fast as a stock mountain bike.
Purple Chopper: the donor fork was inhabited by a colony of ants. I discovered that when I cut the fork blades in two with an angle grinder and had to pound out ants and ant larvae from the the stubs. I call the chopper Ant Farm. The donor forks had a straight gauge 7/8 inch inner diameter steerer that allowed a 7/8 inch steel rod, angle cut, drilled, and tapped, acting as a stem wedge and steerer tube reinforcement to be slid in and be MIG welded.The forks are extended 5 feet with 1 X 0.065 inch garbage-picked steel tubes, which also brace the 1 1/2" X 0.125 inch riser frame tube and extend the head tube reinforcement down to the front brake.
The fork also had two short sections of tube that were used to brace the fork crown. The fork had a little too much bounce at the crown so I built a bolt-on brace that can be seen in the picture of the bike with me in the tux shirt sitting on it. The seat post is also solid 7/8 inch steel, bent in a hydraulic bender. All welding by Mark Jones of Alcon Welding, Small Engines & CNC Machining. The characteristics are best described as light and nimble because of the 11 1/2 inch
chain stays and  a very lightly loaded front wheel, as matter of fact 6 inches of the seat is behind the back axle! 16 inch wheels also contribute to the light feel of the 55-pound bike. The gearing is 40 X 16 with 5 1/2-inch cranks, which is about right for cruising around and wheelies.
Left:The Longchopper,  has 10 speeds, Suntour alloy derailleurs and shifters , a Diacompe center pull front brake, SR crank and bottom bracket, recurved road bike brake levers. The back tire is a surprisingly fresh 25+ year-old Polish musclebike tire. Speaking of Polish, so is the frame. It's a Schwinn-style BMX wannabee; it was extended by using  the front section of a women's frame. The fork brace running to the stem pinch bolt was constructed from a bottom-bracket/chainstay frame section. The seat post is extended and strengthened using 7/8-inch steel rod.
Handling is "a bit different" with the sub-45-degree head angle, but easy to adapt to, because  of a generous amount of fork offset and the small front wheel that keeps things quick.
Left: Scott's Bike
Constructed for BR&K's
recipient of our Bike Hero
Award. A radical but cute
16-inch-wheel chopper that's
an ideal pit bike for the drag races.
Below: My mind must have been a little warped when I got the brain egg for this one. A 24-inch-wheel chopper based on a CCM Ice 18-speed mountain bike. I found it in the garbage complete except for the front wheel and the front triangle cut in two, with sections of the the top and down tubes missing.
I extended the front
forks 5 feet and the front triangle was extended and raked using a bent piece of 2 1/4-inch tube sleeved over the 2 inch down tube and the top tube stubs were internally sleeved with 1 1/8 inch 65 thou' wall tube. I used a steerable wheelie bar wheel idea, that uses a laid back seat post extending back and bent toward the ground with an adjustable height head tube and  fork arrangement with a 12-inch wheel.
Four 6 mm coupling nuts were welded, two to the frame at the front and two to the sissybar, each with an adjusting barrel screwed in. There's crossed-over cables from the forks that steer the wheelie wheel. The cables are anchored using steel center pull brake arms. I built a 6 foot long sissy bar using 1/2 inch solid rod connected much the the same way as on '71 red CCM. The bike has a 96 inch wheelbase, 6 foot long forks, weighs 70+ pounds. My brother was subliminal art director in painting as  he gave me a can of gold and a can of  "chrome" for Christmas. The tires are easy rolling, lively Shin Cheung 2.125 X 24 snake bellies, an early '80 BMX tire. All welding and bending done by Mark Jones of Alcon Welding and CNC Machining. No project is too bizarre for Mark, although I sensed he was close to his emotion limits on this one; as I had to bitch-slap him once when he broke down into hysterics, "Thanks I needed that!"  Just joking Mark!!
Below: CCM Mustang TallChopper
A guy at work had me build a chopper for his son as a present to him on his 16th birthday. The requirements were, it had to be easy to ride and get the rider plenty of attention, so he had his son test ride some of my choppers. He seemed to find a 55-degree head angle the most controllable and I told him getting attention  was not a problem on one of my bikes. I was brought
some assorted parts and a somewhat rare CCM Mustang frame to butcher into choice cuts. The paint scheme was to be Builder's Choice with the only guideline being: "Paint it any color or any way you want with the paint you have on hand, but NO PINK!" So here's the end result.
Left: This is my version of the Keith Moss LWB  landspeeder. I'm still working on the adjustable back rest. It feels kind of fast as is, but I'll know for sure when I take it on the 9- mile commute to work, when it's complete. It's got a bit of "Phat" in it as, when I assembled Scotty's Chopper, he's so length-challenged in the leg I had to cut 3 inches off the seat post so he could touch the ground flat-footed. I used the 1 1/4 inch-diameter piece of scrap to join the chainstay stubs to the lower extended tail of the bike.
Below: Stan's Blue Chopper
The saga of Stan's blue chopper started early this spring when I
garbage picked a lightly used but badly weathered 24 inch wheel mountain bike. It sat in my basement for awhile  before I decided to disassemble it to see how badly it was  seizured. I loosened the stem wedge bolt, with some difficulty, and hammered it down to free the stem wedge and half a cup of stagnate rain water fell on the floor. The chain was toast. The freewheel was junky and the casting was too sloopy for the remover to engage properly, so out comes the angle grinder and the pipe wrench and that was that. Everything else on the bike was pristine except for the tire tubes. It sat in pieces for another month before I
decided what to do, committing hacksaw and file to frame on Easter
Monday. Stan's not a small man so everything would have to be built
strong, especially the fork. I used a straight gauge steerer tube fork
from a kids bike and passed a 7/8" solid steel rod through it, extending
down to the steerer of a second fork for a 24 inch front wheel. The
blades of the top fork were extended to the crown of the second fork,
two square tube cross members were added and a fourth tube was added, bracing against the kustom clamp-on stem at the top of the 7/8" rod, making a
very true fork with very little flex. The shadow gas tank was built using a curved section of a back saver shovel handle. The bike rode so well that the first  half mile test ride turned into a 10- mile one! The butterfly CCM hi-rise bars allow for multiple hand positions.
Below: Pink and Green Chopper
I finished my winter project last friday March 12th, and rode it in the St. Patrick's Day Parade the next morning. My brother rode the medium-sized grey chopper. A great parade as always! I sponge painted the frame for something different and plus my late grandmother was
famous for sponge painting the oil cloth on the summer kitchen floor so it would look like store- bought linoleum. She was an artistic lady who could cook up a meal for 30 men at haying time like it was something she did every day.
Below: Mint-Green Chopper
It all started when I was out to dinner one Sunday evening. I was joking with my brother's buddy Loren that I was going to build him a chopper 12 feet long, for his commute to work, that would make him the hero of downtown; or get him stress leave from work; or maybe both! The forks were made out of bike bits and structural steel I had laying around, the bent 90's were from a mod table pedestal I garbage-picked, and the funky bar steerer tube beefer was a curl bar that my brother give me. The frame is two frames spliced together and a piece of solid 7/8 inch rod joining the two seat posts to provide a crush-proof clamping area and lots of adjustment for the seat and sissybar.
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The handling is very light without wheel flop and I can ride hands-free for short distances, I purposely built the front end with very little over-the-head-tube weight and very little trail, to achieve this. Cargo carrying capacity is always a plus, so I incorporated the luggage rack under the head tube big enough to carry a large Rubbermaid container or a cooler for trips to the beach. The backrest is from a York home gym that was out in the garbage.the bike has good road presence and always gets a reaction and, more often than not, a few photo ops on each ride.
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With this bike I found the stress limit of standard headset cups. I had to go to a combination of euro-sized cones, oversized loose bearings and standard- sized mountainbike cups. As I was
sorting it out, I emailed Parry Faye to see how he solved the problem on his raked-out long choppers; he uses multiple precision sealed hand-cart wheel bearings, and offers for sale- head tube and kustom fork kits.
Last summer I was contracted to build a sociable trike with a  trailer that could carry 1000 lbs, but my  buddy flaked out on the deal shortly after it was completed. It looked like I was going to be stuck with a trailer with nothing to pull it with so I cooked up the bike. Eventually he decided he didn't want the trike either. I ended up with the human powered half ton truck. The trailer has foot-activated wheel brakes.
Below: Human-Powered Truck
Below: "Rube Goldberg" Kid's Tandem
As you can see, this tandem is pretty simple: two frames are welded together,  not even chopped!) Bolted onto the rear dropouts of the front frame is a custom hub shell. The hub shell consists of two right side halves, of threaded hub shells welded together in the center. The final drive sprocket was welded to the inside of the "new" right side hub flange. A single-speed freewheel was threaded on to the right side of the custom shell; on the left side another single speed freewheel was threaded on "backward" and welded so it
wouldn't unscrew under torque. The back crank is left-side drive: I'll have to make sure the pedals stay tight, because the bearing friction will want to unscrew the pedals. The front crank is right-side drive and there is a rear derailleur as a chain tensioner. I had some old GT mags hanging around with an 18- tooth freewheel. Either crank can coast or pedal independently; it makes tandem riding less
awkward. There's 30 inches between the bottom brackets just in case I want to put the seat up and get on the front.
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Special thanks to Mark at Alcon Welding Small Engine Repair and CNC Machining for doing the welding and getting it exactly to specs and dead straight. It was something like jigging up an I.U.D. for a blue whale! Check out the Alcon site at http://www.alconshop.com
No project is too twisted for Mark to wrap his head around. Thanks again, Mark: the kids are having a blast!
.
Below: "Goldmember"
Goldmember is part of the collection of Richard Guy Briggs, who also owns other Mike Watson creations. Amazingly enough, the bike was stolen. Why anyone would steal something as instantly recognizable as this is obviously a sign of  mental derangement or stupidity. The latter is probably closer to the mark, as Richard was easily able to track down the stolen bike, along with  other plunder, since the thieves chose to steal it on a snowy day, allowing Richard to trace its path to where it was badly concealed in a nearby back yard. The complete story is here.