Born To Ride News

The following article appeared in the Space Coast Florida Today Newspaper.

http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20106100309

Rogue

Sturgis Freedom Fighters

Motorcycle Hall Of Fame Member 2005

www.bikerrogue.com

Brothers to build motorcycles at Billy Lane’s former Melbourne shop

BY WAYNE T. PRICE • FLORIDA TODAY • June 10, 2010

Marc Parker certainly doesn’t look or talk the part of the bad boy.

There’s no swagger as he walks around his soon-to-open Melbourne showroom and workshop. Every other word out of his mouth isn’t an expletive. He’s not covered with tattoos.

 ”It’s because I’m from South Carolina and tattoo parlors are illegal in South Carolina,” the 40-year-old Parker said. “You actually have to travel out of state to get tattoos and I never did it. Now that I’m living here in Florida, I guess I should get some.”

 Body art, however, isn’t Parker’s main mission these days. The art of building custom motorcycles is.

Craig Rubadoux, FLORIDA TODAY

 In less than two weeks, he and his brother Shanon, plan on opening Parker Brothers Choppers at 1243 N. Harbor City Boulevard. If the address is familiar, it’s where Billy Lane operated Choppers Inc. for several years.

Parker Brothers has its logo — a shadowy image of the comic and tragedy masks — but it hasn’t been placed in front of the 3,500-square-foot burnt orange colored building where Parker and his brother will operate the business.

They plan to design, build and sell motorcycles ranging from $10,000 to $100,000. Unlike other so-called custom motorcycle shops, the Parker brothers will build entire bikes, including fabricating parts and hand-manufacturing frames and metal work.

“All my life I’ve been building motorcycles and cars,” Parker said. “Where I grew up you start learning to swing a wrench at a pretty early age. You start tinkering with stuff when you’re young and then you start customizing things when you’re a little bit older because you want to make it cool.”

One of those “cool things” is the replica of the “bat pod” motorcycle from “The Dark Knight” Batman movie. The two brothers spent 1,500 hours designing and putting together a working replica and then advertised it on eBay.

It drew tens of thousands of hits and, unfortunately, earned a rebuke from the “Dark Knight” film studio for using an image from the movie in their advertisements without permission.

The brothers quickly removed the movie image and then they decided to raffle off their creation, selling 5,000 tickets at $20 each. The drawing will be held at noon July 31.

If nothing else, the “bat pod” has been good promotional buzz for Parker Brothers Choppers at a time when chopper makers aren’t getting the best publicity.

Lane, whom Parker knew socially, was sentenced in August to six years in prison after pleading no contest to one count of vehicular homicide for crashing his pickup truck head-on into 56-year-old Sebastian Inlet Park ranger Gerald Morelock’s motorcycle in 2006.

Parker, who once owned Parker Brothers bar in downtown Melbourne, stresses that for him, designing motorcycles and choppers is less about image and more about art. And art, more so than the fate of guys like Lane and James, is driven by the tepid recovery of the economy.

By all means, 2009 was a wreck of a year for the industry, according to the Irvine, Calif.-based Motorcycle Industry Council. Sales of street bikes, off-road motorcycles and scooters fell 43.2 percent from 2008. In the first quarter of this year, sales of motorcycles and scooters were down 4.6 percent compared with the same period in 2009.

Choppers, in the last 20 years, have become more popular as motorcycling in general has increased, said Pete terHorst, a spokesman for the Pickerington, Ohio-based American Motorcyclist Association. That niche has been hit by the recession just as the industry as a whole has been affected, he said.

“It’s not inexpensive to buy custom-built motorcycles like that,” terHorst said. “You have to have some expendable dollars to buy them.”

Parker said he is well aware the rocky road ahead, at least for the near future, but he’s confident Parker Brothers Choppers won’t take a spill.

“Everybody is hurting right now,” Parker said of the economy. “But if you do things that are unique enough and you stand out from the rest of the crowd, you can still make a decent living doing the custom-bike thing.”