OK then. So this is where I tell you about davmomoto. What can I say? I love metal and making things out of it. Even as a kid I collected brass objects just because it was so cool. I was awarded the "Senior Metal Worker of the Year" in high school. It was helpful that I was only one of two seniors in the whole metal shop. I was working on hot rods out in West Texas in my teen years and built a "Custom Van" at age 16 out of a seventy-five dollar '63 Ford bar-b-que delivery vehicle. Spent a number of years doing jewelry and small sculpture in the Eighties, casting, fabricating and selling pieces made from gold, silver, brass and copper. Vintage cars, especially sports cars, have always been a passion, and occupied a lot of my constructive energies in the nineties. Upon moving to my current home in late 1995, I found a box tucked up on a shelf. The previous owner left a bunch of stuff, and in this box were two 1969 Honda Z50A headlights, a yellow one and a candy red one. They were like jewels to me, and took me back to my childhood, and the yearning I had for one of these very bikes. Well, perhaps it would have been better if there was a Playboy magazine in that box, as I have aquired more than a few of those bikes since that day. Now I am making custom bikes. A lot of small bikes are still around getting the “treatment,” but bigger bikes, Triumphs, Norton, BSA’s,Suzuki’s, Harley-Davidson, and of course Honda’s are filling the cue. Still doing big sculpture and boutique electronics, but this site is mostly going to be about the bikes.
i have always been an admirer of Japanese Art and culture. Obvious love for their bikes on this site, but many aspects of their art outside of machinery have been inspirational. There are Japanese lanterns I build from steel and stone and Japanese maples all over our property, a koi pond, Zen garden, and black bamboo plantings. Inside, vintage Meissen Kimonos that my wife re-purposes into purses and eyeglass holders. My other passion, circuit bending, is focused largely on Japanese Casio keyboards. As a child, I read a story attributed to Japan that has intrigued me since, and come to personally define the process of art, and in this case particularly, bike building for someone beside myself:
" A man came to an artist's studio and asked him to paint a particular fish. The artist agreed, telling the man to return in one year to pick up his work. At the end of the year, the man returned to the studio to claim his painting. The artist sat him down, went to his easel, and proceeded to flawlessly and swiftly paint the requested fish in a matter of minutes. The man was amazed but also annoyed: "if you could have done this in just a few minutes, why did you make me wait a whole year for it?" The artist said nothing, but opened a cabinet door, and a thousand paintings of the fish fell out."
January 1977, Odessa, Texas.. This 1963 Ford Econoline was my passion. Purchased for $75., it had spent its life as a barbeque catering truck. The wheels and tires were a Christmas present from my parents (interestingly, December is a bad month for mags and tires and they were on sale!)
Spring, 1978. The paint is on, portholes, sunroof, air scoop, custom interior, suspension upgrades, engine replacement, and an 8-track stereo. I was in high-school heaven.
A seventeen year old’s attempt at pinstripe on the 1963 Econoline gauges. There has always been an urge to do it myself regardless of the task. A couple times in my life I heard the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Both times I disregarded the advice as a lack of understanding or imagination on their part. There are no masters of Art, only of technique. Art is the unknowable and freshly discovered, not to be owned or mastered, but expressed in a way so beautiful that Masters bow at the novice’s work.