A couple of years since the spilt with his father and the eventual axing of American Chopper, Paul Teutul Jr still doesn’t get that customising has moved on from bling choppers.
He recently unveiled what he refers to as a café racer at the Las Vegas World of Concrete construction industry convention – yes, a concrete convention. Paul Teutul Jr says in an interview with Cycle World that he could understand why so many people would attend a concrete convention “because every building in the world is made of concrete”.
Maybe his head is made of concrete, because he hasn’t recognised what constitutes a café racer. Paul has basically added clip-ons to what is your basic American Chopper with bolt-on bling.
If you think I’m being a bit tough on Paul Teutul Jr, I’m very sorry. I actually recognise and applaud him and his father for making one aspect of motorcycling so popular on mainstream media. However, the world has moved on and Paul obviously isn’t part of the new trend in customising. He is light years behind custom houses such as Roland Sands, Deus ex Machina and the multitude of small garages and workshops around the world turning out the new hipster machines, café racers, bobbers, baggers, street trackers and scramblers.
Even Cycle World recognised that American Chopper created the “shopping-cart custom chopper craze of the late 1990s through mid-2000s” referring to how people like the Teutuls would “simply buy a pre-fab frame, bolt in a crate motor and round out the rest with billet bolt-ons”. But they also recognise it has “died for the most part”.
After leaving Orange County Choppers, Paul opened “Paul Jr. Designs” which was commissioned to make this bike for a tool company as a customer giveaway. The result is this muscle chopper with a few café racer embellishments. It is powered by a 100cu in (1638) Black Crazy Horse 45-degree “Bottlecap” V-twin with 85 horsepower and 129Nm of torque. It has an S&S Super E carburetor, chromed twin SuperTrapp exhausts, HHI brakes, Baker left-side drive, six-speed transmission, 3-inch open primary belt and chain final drive, all mounted to a rigid frame with upside-down forks.
Other details are a black leather/suede saddle with an embossed PJD logo at the rear, plus billet hand