Stripped down, light weight, primitive, some have huge amounts of horsepower in tiny little cars, some handle poorly, some stop poorly, while some of course handle great, and stop well. Some have very primitive suspension that barely funtions or doesn't function at all, and some.... have tons and tons of GARBAGE tack welded to them in an foolish and misguided attempt to generate some sort of false patina, or to try to make it look "kool".
(Whatever that means. Don't ask me... I have never been cool, or kool.)
And as we all know, there are a lot of those crappy bikes out there that people call Choppers that are EXACLTY like that.
"Wow! I found this bucket of rusty trash at a swap meet! Lets see how much of it I can weld to my bike!"
Gag me with a chainsaw.
Now a lot of those hot rods are treated as fragile, non-functioning "pieces of art", "historical items of interst", "inferior cars", "jalopys" or "junkers" by their owners/builders and general public.
Not to many consider them to be legitimate functioning vehicles that can and should be used all the time.
Some are never used for anything but bar hopping, or going to local shows.
But some of them however... are used and abused on a regular basis.
And of course many of their owners have discovered what many chopper owners have allready found out long ago:
Light weight and simplicity works well.
They aren't all fragile, and some of them when built right, are stronger than newer heavier cars.
Tight, stiff suspension (or no suspension in the case of a chopper with a rigid frame.) ...is not always a disadvantage.
Sometime soon I plan on talking about the advantages of a rigid frame. Stay tuned.
So, here are some shots of some various hotrods being flogged in competition... in the dirt. Skidding, sliding, and spinning, like a proper car or chopper should be.
All these photos are from Spooky21's Flickrstream, and were all taken in New Zealand.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8021817@N07/
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