America's Most Beautiful Motorcycle

AMERICA’S MOST BEAUTIFUL MOTORCYCLE

With the credentials, and the trophy, to prove it

WALK UP TO A GROUP of riders and proclaim that your custom bike is the most beautiful in all the land and you will wind up in some heated arguments. If it happens to be the wrong group, you also might wind up with a broken nose or a black eye. But when your bike wins the “America’s Most Beautiful Motorcycle” trophy at the country’s most prestigious custom show, well, who’s to argue?

Certainly not Carl Brouhard (www.brouhard designs.com), designer and builder of the bike that won that very award this past January at the 59th annual Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona, California. With its curvaceous body, jewel-like paintwork, gargantuan rear tire and twin-turbocharged V-Four bulging from its engine bay, Brouhard’s creation grabs your attention and holds it tightly for quite a while.

“I’d never had a bike in the Roadster Show before,” says Brouhard, “but I really wanted to win-not just for me but for the bike’s owner, Mike Maggio. He lives in San Dimas, just a couple of miles from Pomona, so the show is practically in his back yard.”

Brouhard knew it would take an exceptional piece of work to have a chance of winning in this premier competition, but he didn’t want to step outside his own boundaries of taste and style. “I tried to design something cool that I would want to own myself,” he says, “something not too bizarre yet a bit over the edge. The four-cylinder engine and twin turbos made the job easier.”

That engine is, of course, the centerpiece for this award-winner, which Brouhard values at about $175,000. He started with the base motor, a 214cubic-inch beast called the V-Quad. It’s a commercially available engine built by Nelson Engineering (www. v-quad.com) using four H-D Evo-style cylinders and heads fitted onto a single crankshaft and common crankcase from TP Engineering. Nelson claims a “stock” V-Quad lives in the vicinity of 250 horsepower; but that neighborhood wasn’t high-rent enough for Brouhard, so he had Trask Performance in New Zealand put together a one-off twin-turbo setup, including reworked 45mm Mikuni carbs and a complete exhaust system. “I haven’t yet run it on a dyno,” says Brouhard, “but I’m certain that it makes at least 300 honest horsepower.”

All that turbo’d urge is delivered to an enormous, 360mm (that’s 14.2 inches wide!) Vee Rubber Monster rear tire through a Performance Machine belt primary drive and a TrikShift right-side-drive six-speed transmission. To keep the 18-inch MHT rear wheel as uncluttered as possible, a Speedway Choppers Trans Brake mounts a dualpiston caliper and stainlesssteel rotor on the transmission’s belt-drive pulley.

For his chassis, Brouhard had 8-Ball Manufacturing fab a frame with a 42degree head angle and the company’s ride-heightadjustable air shock working on a shapely swingarm. The fork is an ultra-slick American Suspension piece that integrates the brake caliper and its attendant hydraulic line into the inside edge of the left leg; no external brake hoses, no visible caliper hardware. The fork also was kicked out another 6 degrees to give a total rake of 48 degrees.

Sheetmetal credits go to Fatkats for the gas tank and fenders, Twisted Metal Fabrication for everything else, including the formed handlebar. Accutronics supplied the dual-beam high-intensity headlight, and the taillights are two narrow Radiance LED strips tucked into the back of the

AMERICAN FLYERS

rear fender. Similar LEDs are cleverly molded into the sides of the swingarm to serve as turnsignals. Where one might possibly hang a license plate, though, is a mystery. The seat-what little there is of it-is by Santana.

All of the paintwork was done by Brouhard hisowndamnself, from the design to the actual application. He started with SEM “Shovelhead Red” paint but then used pearls and fades to give the ultimate finish its deep, three-dimensional effect. “I don’t like complicated paint and graphics,” he says. “I prefer to keep it simple to show off the

lines of the bodywork.”

And the man from Grass Valley, California, certainly knows paint. Originally a sign painter, he built his first bike as a hobby in 1991 and sold it just two days after its completion-an epiphany of sorts that prompted him to try making a living building and selling customs. Soon thereafter, he started doing design work for legendary custom builder Arlen Ness, including penning the famous 1957 Chevythemed “Ness-Stalgia.” The rest, as they say, is history,

as Brouhard has become one of motorcycling’s most respected custom designers and builders.

His mission at the moment is to win the AMBM award two years in a row. “It’ll be tough,” he says. “I’ll have to build something even better than this bike, but I look forward to the challenge.”

Based on Brouhard’s track record, we wouldn’t bet against him coming home once again with that coveted trophy-and, of course, no black eye or broken nose.

-Paul Dean