Thursday, Sept. 14, 2006 | 7:23 a.m.
What: Las Vegas BikeFest
Where: Cashman Center, Fremont Street Experience and other venues
When: Today through Sunday
Tickets: $10 for vendor village, some events free
Information: www.lasvegasbikefest.com
The bike's frame took two weeks to paint, 176 hours of airbrushing and coating in shades of orange until it gleamed like Satan's spleen. Paul Stewart didn't get it back until late Saturday and now he has to put it all back together before today's big show at the Las Vegas BikeFest.
He's been working 19 hours a day, from before sunrise until midnight, helping his guys screw and torque and bang the pieces together. And if the chopper builders who will judge him look at the four-part gas tank and bulging, curving lines and say his is more bad-ass than the other 25 bikes, unique enough to win, then, well, then good things just may happen.
A $25,000 check, for starters. Magazine covers? Sure. And out there, the big one, the thing that could put him on the very short list of builders of incredibly shaped and hysterically expensive dream bikes what about, you know, a TV show? Jesse James, Orange County Choppers? Maybe. Maybe. He's in talks.
"This is like a steppingstone," Stewart says. "You need to take it."
But what if he slips, knocks the bike over or gouges it with a screwdriver? What about scratches? Stewart has an expletive for that. "It's over, then."
The painter is on a trip to Mexico and won't be back before the show.
"You've just got to be very, very cautious," Stewart says as he cringes and rubs dirty, knitted brows with a grease-stained hand.
Stewart's shop, Dynamic Choppers, sits in a dingy strip mall on Desert Inn Road, about a mile-and-a-half from the Strip. Half of the shop is linoleum, sparse and clean, with a few old chairs, some parts in a display case, a few motorcycle magazines on a rack and about a dozen of Stewart's choppers - big, sweeping brutes with back tires fat as pairs of bowling balls and most in black and chrome with gleaming sharp nubbins. The combination of graceful lines and rude power makes them look like Pleistocene predators, smilodons ready to eat Hondas.
Stewart mostly builds nine kinds of bikes with V-twin engines. They start at $16,000 and go up to $35,000, but that only gets you the basic bike. Most customers want customization, pipes and pegs and grips and paint, and more. That can take two months or 18 months and push the bike's cost as high as you care to go.
Where the bikes go to become beautiful (or ugly, if that's what the customer wants) is next door to Stewart's shop. It's neither sparse nor clean, with metal shavings on the floor, air perfumed by solvents and lubricants and shelf after shelf of bike bits.
"People have seen too much TV," says Troy Chambers, Stewart's master builder of four months. "They think it's all glamour and fame and "
"Naked chicks and whatnot," Stewart interjects.
"Right. But it's not. It's hard work."
This is where the orange demon is being built, hour after hour, almost every piece of it unique and designed, cut, bent and welded to create something that will be worth $200,000 to its undisclosed buyer and maybe push this shop to the top.
It's nothing like the other 50 or so choppers he'll sell this year, basic bikes he builds and modifies for guys making $200 or $300 payments every month - carpenters, plumbers, maybe guys with a small business of their own who don't mind having a motorcycle nicer than their cars. No, the demon is for someone else, someone who can buy a bike for the price of a condo and can afford to pay at least $40,000 to fix it if he ever tips it over in the parking lot. Someone who prizes something because it's unique.
When it's all put together - heaven forbid any falls or scratches - it will look like it was designed by Hieronymus Bosch and H.R. Geiger after a night on the town.
But don't call his designs art. Stewart may be exhibiting it in a show called "Artistry in Iron," but he doesn't have to like the term. Ask him about bikes as art and Stewart, a sturdy English import, looks at you like you've just made a floater.
"A motorcycle is to be ridden," Stewart says, slowly and with emphasis. "It's not just supposed to sit there."
Press him, ask him if it ever feels creative building bikes, and he gives a little. Not when he's beating on it with a hammer, of course, but after the polishing and detail work, when he shows the mocked-up orange demon to the client for the first time, well, maybe.
"This is a guy who is worth, I don't know, millions, billions," Stewart says. "He looked like it was Christmas."
But the door clangs shut when you ask him to describe his creative process.
"Guinness," he says. "I drink lots of Guinness and get visual."
Right. And there are no sketches to see because Stewart says he keeps all of his designs in his head, a place where no one can steal them and no one can see them until they are built.
And always built at a hard pace, especially before the shows, when "normal life goes right out the window." When that's going on, Stewart says, all he gets out of the bikes is, running his hand through his long goatee, "gray hair here," and, running his hand over his widow's peak, "no hair here."
Stewart's parts and sales manager, Jack Fehrenz, is bouncing around the shop, bopping a phone against his thigh, ebullient about the orange demon's chances.
"It would be huge for a builder from Vegas to win this," Fehrenz says. "This is by far the trickest bike we've ever built."
Stewart is circumspect.
"I won't know until we get there and see what everyone else has. I think in the unique situation, it's very, very good," he says. "But you never know until you're there."
And between here and there: a long day, three hours of sleep, another long day, three more hours of sleep delicate work the whole way.
"Look at it this way: Build a Lamborghini. Take it apart into 500 pieces and send them out to be worked on," Stewart says with a wince.
"Then put them back together and hope."
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