No one knows who exactly built the first choppers, but it is generally agreed upon that they were built by soldiers returning home from WWII. Soldiers who had ridden bikes in Europe found that the Harleys being produced in the US were slow and bulky, something that is still true today. In an effort to lighten these bikes up the riders started to remove unnecessary parts and “bob” the fenders. Had the European motorcycles been readily available in America I believe that these bikers might have abandoned Harley right then and we would have a completely different biker scene than what we have today.
These early modified bikes were called Bobbers and the term Choppers actually didn’t get popular until the sixties and early seventies. Most sources reference the movie Easy Rider as the start of the cultural phenomena, but national news about the antics of the Hells Angels certainly had the image of the biker outlaw already fixed in the public’s eye, a much badder version than we saw in the movie The Wild One from 1953. Continue reading ‘History Of Choppers As I See It’ »