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On The Road Again

This week finds me in upstate New York, home to TV’s favorite chopper builders, Orange County Choppers.

No, I don’t know senior, or junior for that matter. Luckily I do know Skeeter Todd, who works behind the scenes at OCC. Skeeter explained to me recently that OCC was using House of Kolor Paint. It just so happens that we have a new Jon Kosmoski Kustom Painting book coming out next year. So when Skeeter told me that OCC is now using Jon’s paint, and that he could get me into the shop to shoot some paint sequences, I immediately singed on for a three-day stay.

What I learned shortly after my arrival is the fact that there’s a whole lot more to OCC than what we see on TV every week.

For size and class, the new OCC building in Newburgh, NY puts a lot of Harley dealerships to shame.

As you might expect, there’s a giant sales floor, with everything from endless T-shirt racks, to branded OCC bikes. What you might not expect is the section dedicated to Ducati sales. This includes the full Ducati line, along with branded jackets and assorted products.

The show floor includes this group of OCC bikes scheduled to ship out to Canadian dealers.

Over in a different corner of the sales floor is an unusual addition to the rows of motorcycles and racks of leather jackets – a bandstand. Yup, OCC has their own Rock N Roll band, and in the afternoons they’re likely to crank it up for a practice session, meaning anyone shopping at that time gets the benefit of a free concert.

Every garage needs a Garage Band. At OCC they know how to have a hell of a good time building motorcycles.

It’s when you get off the sales floor though that things get really interesting. First, there’s the huge shop, complete with the lifts and equipment seen so often on TV. But wait, there’s more. Like a complete, and I mean complete, machine shop, with a row of CNC machines, and a five-axis water jet that’s handy for cutting cool shapes out of three-dimensional objects, like fenders.

For designing the fenders, and the bikes, and their own wheels, there’s a design center with powerful computer, talented operator and a 3-D printer. What this means is that you can design a wheel, or a tank or a complete bike, and the little box to the right of the computer will “print” a 3-D version of that object – in a reduced size of course.

There’s also a huge press, which means the OCC crew can stamp out their own parts, after first designing the plug on the computer and having it cut on one of the CNC machines.

There isn’t a hell of a lot that they can’t manufacture in house at OCC. And when it’s time for paint, well there are three talented painters in-house who can handle everything from basecoat/clearcoat to elaborate airbrushed designs.

If the crew at OCC wants to know what a certain design actually looks like in three dimensions they just create the image on the screen and then hit “print.”

Maybe that’s the really interesting part of the story. That in addition to the talent seen on TV, there’s another whole level of talent. The mostly unseen crew who toil away quietly making fenders, molding welds and painting motorcycles.

At OCC it’s all about teamwork. Combining the talent with the talent to create some pretty cool motorcycles.

The huge show room is ringed by many of the theme bikes created for the TV.