The ride lasted about an hour and a half. A couple of police bikes escorted us, and the film crew rode in a minivan ahead of us. As the three of us drove into Brighton, the crowd was thick and got thicker as we neared our destination. Before we knew it, we were surrounded by a sea of people as far as we could see in every direction. It made the scene at the Ace Café look like nothing. We had to slow our bikes to where we were barely moving, and the crowd swarmed us. I don’t know if that’s what it feels like to be trapped in the middle of a European soccer crowd, but that’s as close to the experience as I want to get. Because the bikes were air cooled and we weren’t moving, they started to overheat. We had to leave the bikes right there in the middle of the crowd and jump into the van with the film crew to complete the trip to our destination.
When we arrived, the three Discovery Europe execs were worried because of the crowd size. A stage had been set up inside tall fences, and when we went onto the stage, people starting climbing over the fences. It was pandemonium. After fifteen minutes onstage, event officials said they could not control the crowd and asked us to leave the stage and go to a limo waiting to drive us away.
That event is always big, typically drawing about seventy thousand fans. That year, with our appearance heavily promoted, there were about one hundred thousand in attendance. As part of the event marketing, kids were given fake mustaches that looked like my father’s. There were kids all over the place wearing those mustaches.
We knew American Chopper was a global craze because half of our merchandise sales came from overseas. But to go overseas for the first time and see up close how many people loved our show was really, really amazing.
I still have no idea what happened to those three Harleys we had to abandon. Or, for that matter, the three executives who said we wouldn’t need security.
CHOPPER DOWN UNDER
The following season we spent two weeks in Australia filming three episodes for the Australian Tourism Board. That was another whirlwind trip. We met up with Russell Crowe, and we had a great time with him. He asked us to build a bike for his rugby team, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, and we got to watch them play.
Mikey and I dove the Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, while my father and our manager panicked over our safety. The current was strong there, and we hand-walked down ropes anchored to the bottom. We were horizontal on our way down, laid out straight in the current. It felt almost like we were flying.
On our way down, a giant hammerhead shark passed directly beneath us. Mikey and I looked at each other like, “What have we gotten ourselves into?” The guys diving with us just gave us a thumbs-up.
At the bottom, there were large clams in fluorescent colors. We were able to see unique things and bright, vibrant colors in the Great Barrier Reef. That was a cool experience to share with Mikey.
We also climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and learned how to surf on Bondi Beach. We saw Ayers Rock—a 1,142-foot high monolith in the center of Australia—and spent a day with the Aboriginal people. Then we went to Hamilton Island on the east coast. That is an amazing island chain.
Next we went to the coastal city of Coffs Harbour, where Russell gave us a tour of the farm where his parents lived part time. Russell had a place there where he kept items from his movies, and he showed us a lot of great props. I got to put on a helmet from Gladiator, one of my favorite movies. We also spent part of a day riding bikes with Russell all over Coffs Harbour.
Our trip culminated with a big show with a live build onstage. Twelve thousand people came to watch the build.
I loved the Australian people. They were nuts—in a good way. The Australians we encountered had a New Yorker mentality. They were my kind of people.
DON’T STARE AT LIONS!
For season 5, we visited Brazil and South Africa. In Brazil, we ate at the presidential palace with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his family. That was our first experience hanging out with a president. After eating a top-shelf Brazilian-style steak, I have yet to find a Brazilian steakhouse anywhere that can compare.
We rode in a parade in São Paolo. The Brazilian capital city is one of the largest in the world and seemed like it extended forever. As our plane approached for landing, São Paulo looked like a dozen New York Cities.
Some of my most memorable images of Brazil are sad. We came to a stop sign and a little boy came out to us, begging for money and food. The kid was maybe three years old and by himself. We drove for miles past boxes that people lived in. The poverty there was heart crushing.
Perhaps our biggest security scare over the life of our show came in Brazil during a big bike show signing. We had heightened security at the time, but we still had not been able to leave the hotel on our own because of a string of kidnappings that had recently taken place. Also, someone had been stabbed at the bike event earlier in the day, so we already were on high alert when we arrived.
Our signing table was on a stage. I can get anxious in a large crowd, so the first thing I would do at a big autograph session was look for an exit—just in case. The only stairs were the ones that led up to the stage; behind us was a curtain backdrop. Behind that curtain was scaffolding that supported the stage, then a twenty-five-foot drop-off to the ground. There was nowhere to go if anything went wrong.
The crowd started rushing the stage and pushing our table, and the security personnel were not attempting to control the people. I left my seat, crawled through the curtain, and started down the scaffolding. Finally, security stepped in and regained control. I climbed back up the scaffolding and finished signing autographs.
We had probably a handful of scary times when crowds got out of control like that. When there are that many people involved, a situation can deteriorate in a heartbeat and become life threatening.
I experienced a scare of a different kind in South Africa.
South Africa was an absolutely amazing place. We stayed at Zwahili Game Lodge, a huge preserve two hours north of Johannesburg. We were on safari each day, viewing game such as giraffes, leopards, zebras, jackals, impalas, aardvark, and warthogs, among others. But no lions.
We visited another preserve belonging to a wealthy man who owned the first independent insurance company in South Africa. He had the finest preserve in the country, including white rhinos and the biggest alligators. He had built the world’s largest man-made dam—at least that’s what we were told—to secure his hippopotamuses and alligators.
His preserve had lions, and a couple of weeks earlier, a poacher had entered the property and been killed by one of the lions. Afterward, security noticed that the lions were beginning to stalk them near the borders. When a lion kills a human, the pride is considered damaged goods because they will then hunt humans. Because it was not known which lion had killed the poacher, all the lions had to be quarantined until they could be sold to hunting preserves.
At the preserve, we were taken to see the lions up close and personal while they were inside their fenced-in areas. We were checking out the lions as our guide told us about the poacher being killed and the quarantine. The guide informed us that the best thing to do if charged by a lion is not to run. That didn’t make sense to me, but he said if a person runs, the lion will chase him. If the person stands his ground, however, the lion might consider the person a threat and stop his charge.
I was eyeballing one particular lion about fifty feet from me. Perhaps I was guilty of intentionally provoking the lion a little, but I felt brave with the fence between us. The lion started looking irritated, and I kept staring at him. Then in a flash, the lion started at me in full charge.
“Don’t run,” the guide instructed me.
Everything within me wanted to run, but I stood right there and didn’t move. The lion sprinted right up to the fence and stopped. That’s called a mock charge. The lion wanted to let me know that I shouldn’t have been messing with him, and by that point, I was ready to concede that he was correct.
I coul
d not believe how quickly the lion reached the fence. That big animal moved at impressive speed. I slowly backed away, with my heart pounding out of my chest.
I remember saying, “Thank God that fence was there!”
“Do you know,” the guide said, “if that lion wanted to come through that fence, he would have gone through it without breaking pace?”
I walked away wondering what was wrong with me. And who built that fence?
Balancing filming the show with operating our business kept us under constant pressure to meet deadlines—with emphasis on deadlines, plural. We had client deadlines for their unveils, which usually revolved around a product launch or a trade show. Those deadlines couldn’t be changed. We had our own deadlines that were part of running a business. And then we had editing deadlines so that the episodes would be ready to air on a certain date. If one of those deadlines wasn’t looming, the others were. We worked under nonstop deadline pressure for the full decade of American Chopper.
The high-end custom bikes that appeared on the show resulted in a significant demand for Orange County Chopper bikes. Three of us worked in the shop the day the phone call came from Craig Piligian—and that included my father and me. At its peak, OCC had exploded to around seventy employees in all areas of the business.
We moved our operation from the back of the steel business to the larger space upstairs, or “up top” as we called it. Then we moved again for a few years into a building in Montgomery with about twenty thousand square feet.
From the Montgomery shop, we sold bikes as fast as we could make them. We’d always had what we considered production bikes, which is a line of bikes built the same instead of customized. All the specifications are the same, so parts can be mass-produced and bikes can be assembled in larger numbers.
My father wanted to come up with a different style of bike from what we were offering at the time. It wasn’t a bad idea, in my opinion, but we were already moving large numbers of bikes. Our custom bikes were selling at good prices, with no end in sight to the demand. And it wasn’t like anyone was sitting around the shop with nothing to do.
Production bikes require ramping up in advance—there is a lot of inventory involved, and the bikes have to be made without having buyers in place. Making production bikes can get expensive. But my father insisted that we needed a new style.
I had come up with a design called the Splitback, which was a very curvy bike with half tanks. I didn’t create the look with the intention of it becoming a production bike, because with all the curves and arches, there were too many problems to make the design work repetitively in an efficient manner. I believed that trying to make a production bike out of that design could become a mess. However, my father wanted to put that bike into production.
As I feared, the Splitback proved to be a nightmare as a production bike. We never could seem to get it right because of all the curves. We had to outsource to several different people in an attempt to get the frames and the stampings built like we wanted. I felt the bike was too costly for what my father wanted to accomplish, and that became a major point of contention between us.
My father and I disagreed on most things when it came to the business. He is hyperemotional about how he makes decisions, while I am a conservative decision maker. I believe that if you have to rush into a decision, then it’s the wrong decision. My father didn’t feel that way.
Our differences when it came to business seemed to grow the longer the show stayed on the air. Pre–American Chopper and even in the show’s early years, I think Dad would at least take my opinion into consideration when we differed.
TANKS FIRST
More often than not, the gas tank is the starting point for creating the theme of a build. There is almost no way to avoid the tank becoming the focal point of a bike. The tank is the highest point other than the handlebars, which have minimal value because we are somewhat limited in how many different ways we can design them and keep the bike rideable. Thus, people’s eyes tend to first go to the gas tank.
After the tank, the fenders usually come next because they continue what the tank starts theme-wise. The handlebars follow the fenders. The exhaust is one of the last things we build, unless we have a theme that requires building the exhaust first.
This probably sounds odd, but after we build the tank, the bike usually tells us what it wants to become. The bike speaks to me visually, and the rest begins to flow out from there. The second build-off bike developed that way. Once we applied the car theme with the tank, it became obvious what the next section needed to be and the build started to complete itself.
When the show started, I fought hard regarding our look and feel in the licensing of products. Styles tend to trend, and skulls, spades, and dog heads were popular at the time. We were receiving pressure from licensing experts to be trendier in our products, and my father liked their ideas. But I didn’t want us to cave to the pressure. I didn’t have problems with skulls, for instance, but I didn’t think they fit our brand. I wanted to protect our brand and not just follow whatever trend was popular at the time. I wanted us to be consistent with our look.
I was a stickler about our brand because I felt like my part in the company was the brand creatively. I contributed the creative to the business, with the bikes I designed and the logo I created. OCC’s look and feel began with what I was producing, and that dated to before the show. I was conscious of my creative flare and how our products and logo said who we were as a company. Our bikes were different from those of other builders, and it was important to me all along to maintain our identity.
For the most part, my father left the licensing matters to me, and I managed our brand until I left the company. It wasn’t more than a few months after I was gone that skulls started appearing on basically everything related to OCC.
More and more, with each season, my father seemed to listen to me less and less. My father invested close to a million dollars in a failed attempt to create a process that would make a powder coat look like chrome. To appreciate why this would have been amazing but also impossible, you have to understand the difference between chrome and a powder coat.
Powder coat is a coating system like paint that gets baked onto the bike parts. In powder coating, the metal is positively charged and the powder, which is negatively charged, is sprayed onto the metal. The negative charge causes the powder to stick to the metal, which is then baked at a high temperature. Ultimately, powder coat looks like paint, except it is much more durable.
Chrome is a three-stage plating process. The chrome is dipped into a tank with ingots like copper, nickel, and then chrome. Chrome cannot be duplicated on metal any other way.
Powder coating is color based, and we match the powder coat to the paint job. The final chrome product has a mirror finish. Powder coat is a great method for providing durability on a frame, and finding a way to have a chrome look with a powder coat’s durability would be a significant technological advance; it would save time and a lot of money.
My father talked with some guy who was working on a super-chrome process that would give powder coat that chrome look. We never really understood the guy’s formula, but he said he was about 90 percent of the way to figuring out the process, so my father decided to invest in his idea. My father was gung ho about investing, but I argued against it every opportunity I had. No one had ever been able to make powder coat look like chrome, and I knew there had to be a good reason why. I’m not opposed to trying new things, but I didn’t consider it smart to invest close to a million dollars into something that essentially was a hope and a prayer.
My father reached a point with me that anytime I disagreed with him, or held what I thought was a reasonable position on why we should or should not do something, he would automatically choose to go the opposite direction—and with ferocity. Sometimes, I strategically would not say anything in opposition to his plans in hopes that his idea would subside without my objection.
Because my father had inc
onsistencies in his decision making, he would often waver. Although he was the ultimate decision maker at OCC, he was heavily influenced by a handful of lawyers and managers he kept around him. There was no question about that.
THE BIG MISTAKE
Perhaps our biggest disagreement centered on the building of a new company headquarters. My father purchased three-plus acres of prime real estate in the town of Newburgh, where he, the OCC manager, and others in his circle of influence wanted to build a new company headquarters. The total cost was projected at around $13 million.
That big of an investment didn’t make sense to me, considering the amount of money we were bringing in. At the time, we had a retail space up the street from our shop that was doing very well. In a meeting about the plans, the first question I asked was, “If this building costs us five times what it’s costing us now, will this new retail space make five times the amount of money as the retail space we have now?” I was told no by the head of our retail. So then I said that someone needed to explain to me why we were building this monstrosity of a building when we could stay in our present location, which was pretty much paid for and functioning well for us. I never received a satisfactory explanation.
The plan made no sense to me, and my father and I fought about it constantly.
That was another case that demonstrated the different approaches my father and I took business-wise. My father liked to throw out big numbers—whether they were accurate or not—to create excitement and then ride that wave to have everyone moving forward together. The supporters were throwing around a figure of $30,000 per custom bike and then we would build something like 600 production bikes per year, which, by the way, was physically impossible for our setup. From that, they came up with $9 million in sales per year. Except it would possibly cost about $8.5 million per year just to build the bikes, and the projected $500,000 difference is why I kept getting into back-and-forths with my father and the others, trying to get someone—anyone—to tell me how the new building made sense financially.
The Build Page 8
