1942 Flathead Chopper Build

Hey Kevin Bass here from bass Mellow Craft vintage bike addiction. Another episode of Fix My Hog today we got a really cool project that we're gonna be working on. Now from my previous videos, you might have seen me do some stock restoration, some uh modifications, some service work. Today, we got something a little different. We got a chopper.

And what's neat about this chopper is this thing's got some history and it's got some, you know, hometown Seoul with Minneapolis here. So looking at this bike in front of you, you can see that it's obviously got some sort of a different front end. It's got a longer one. It's got a raked frame and all that. We're gonna talk about that.

So before we begin, I wanna just kind of walk you through this bike, what it's all about and explain what this chopper is gonna be when it's done. So we're looking at right now is an old Smith brothers and Federal Girder front end with a modified, probably a panhead frame and back in the seventies. Uh Smith brother F, they were like on top of their game with customizing choppers building cool bikes racing drag race and all that. So this bike is kind of a survivor because it's got one of the Smith Brother F's original Girders with one of their frames. They originally, uh, raked stretched and, and modified to make it this chopper stance.

And as you can see when you look at it, it's got the longer front end, but everything sits pretty flat and level, which is what you want with a chopper. You don't want them sitting super high and goofy. This one should handle really nice. Um Looking at the whole picture of this bike. There's a few things I wanna point out going to the back of the bike, you'll notice there's Invader style wheels, ok.

These are kind of a unique old chopper piece from back in the day. It is still a drum brake. So it's an invader with a drum brake on it. And what's cool about this is, that's actually a 15 inch rim. So a 15 inch rim that was kind of specific more to a car tire style tire.

And so this is actually a car tire that's run on there right now. What's nice about running a 15 inch rim with these old car tires is, is it's, it's kind of that old school look, but also you get a tire way cheaper and they last forever. So it's kind of a neat touch having that 15 inch on there. I'm looking up at just the rear fender in the uh sissy area here. This is an old model, a spare tire cover.

So back in the day when you were chopping stuff, you were just looking around for parts you could use off of cars even because the metal shaping the fabrication back in those days wasn't like it is today. You know, today people are building everything from scratch with all kinds of fancy tools. But back in the day if you're in your garage building old chopper, you're looking around, hey, I got an old model, a back rusting up with that spare tire cover is in good shape and that would be a cool fender to use. So you can see that's what was used here. The struts here in the little sissy bar pull, this is actually just rebar, so bent rebar.

So again using what you got and then this tail light on here actually came off. It looks like it's off a, a semi front fender marker light. So kind of neat touches. And that's what's great about these choppers. You put your own touch into them, you build them with whatever you have your means and you make it your own.

So it's different than anybody else's. Nobody else can say I have that exact same thing, maybe similar but never exactly the same. So this is kind of neat to have that kind of a rear touch on it. Looking around going a little bit further forward. We'll see that.

This is, it's actually a jockey shift style transmission here. Original four speed with, it'll be a slop top. We call that. So it doesn't actually have the ratchet top where it would ratchet in the first gear. Second gear, third gear.

This one, you have to feel it as you're going. If you don't feel that click just right, you'll miss a gear. So this one takes a little more skill to ride, but it should be a fun one. Again. Original four speed tranny will be putting a clutch on and the primary drive later, once we get a motor in it, um, going to the gas tank, you may notice and think.

Wow, man, why don't you wash that thing? Well, what's cool about Survivor bikes is that they are how they kind of were back in the seventies or even earlier, depending on when you found it. But this gas tank, when I put this bike together, um, I wanted to have that old Survivor feel and I found this gas tank in a chicken coop. It was actually mounted as some old Honda and you can see the dust in the patina from sitting in there for probably 50 years. And that's something I don't want to wash away because to me that has soul and what I love about old bikes and old parts that are beat up and crusty and have stories is that they have that soul.

Somebody was riding this bike back in the day, somebody painted that bike probably in their garage and it sat in a chicken coop for all these years and I was able to find it and resurrect it and it's gonna be on a bike that's gonna be on the road. So that's kind of cool. It means something. I'm looking at the handle bars. We're running some nice little drag bars here.

Uh, there is a nice little touch here with the internal throttle. So we'll be talking about that when we get the motor and the carburetor. But this one runs all internally. So you don't have a big housing here. Uh, there obviously no clutch because we're gonna have a foot clutch with the jockey shift.

So this is kind of gonna be a real cut down lean, mean chopper, it's gonna look good going down the road. It should be a real head turner. And then again, going to the front into this Smith Brothers Petro original Girder, you can see the Girder style front end, how it looks different. There's one spring in the middle, uh just a little, some sort of a little car headlight down there. And then again, the front wheel is another invader style wheel, but it's called a spool hub.

And what a spool hub means is you don't have any, uh FLS or anything for brakes. It just runs without a front brake. Now, when you run a spool hub, front wheel on a chopper, especially with Joey shift. Now, you gotta be careful. They call it suicide clutch for a reason because when you're on that bike and you don't, if you don't have a neutral and you slip off that clutch pedal and it's in gear, you're gonna go and you gotta be careful that without a front brake, you really have no way to stop yourself because you're trying to do the clutch and find that rear brake.

So be careful, safety is always a big thing. If you don't feel comfortable with it, I would say change it up, put something else on with uh a brake. But overall this whole bike, you know, the way it sits, it's not gonna take a whole lot. But what we're gonna do to this, it used to have a knucklehead motor in 1946 knuckle motor. Uh, that motor got pulled out to get rebuilt and in its place, we are gonna put in this beautiful 1942 UL flathead and a UL flat.

This is a 74 inch. This is a big twin. What you got to understand is people that are getting into old bikes and they, oh, I, I just picked up a flathead. You know, I wanna put it in something like this. You gotta make sure it's a U or UL or Ulh if it's not the U series and it's a W series or a AG series even.

That's a 45 inch, that's a smaller, uh uh, cubic inch motor. It's not gonna fit in this style frame. You need a whole different configuration. So make sure you do your research before you just buy something because it looks cool because if you buy the wrong motor with the wrong frame, they're not gonna match. And now you're back to the drawing board, but this big twin flathead mounts up just like a knucklehead or a panhead would in these old frames, there may be some different shimming needed and I'll show you how to do that when we get it in.

But when we put that in there and we get it bolted down, we get everything hooked up. We're gonna do some modifications. Obviously, we'll have to, uh, fab up some pipe mounts, uh, redo our oil lines because the oil linings are different from the knuckle to the flathead. And there'll be a few things that we need to change up to make this work. But overall, you know, you're gonna walk through the process with me.

I'm gonna show you, we're gonna find the bumps in the road and we're gonna smooth them out and get this thing done. So stay tuned.