Southpaw Machine And Ross Are The Greatest!!!

A while back Ross and I had been talking about military stuff especially aircraft like we tend to do at times and the idea of a derby cover for my bike came up. For those of you who don't know I was a crewchief on Hueys for 10 years in the Army and I still love that aircraft. The Huey is the flying equivalent of a Shovelhead. It's a beautiful aircraft and truly simple in terms of modern electronics. It's a mechanic's aircraft though. Not a modular remove and replace one like too many modern machines are. Anyway, because of this conversation Ross said he could make me a derby cover if I gave him the art. So I started with this.....

Youc an see this Huey has the door guns and mounts on the sides and I knew they would not translate well as a silhouette so I modified the picture.....

And it ended up like this after an hour or so of manipulating. A nice clean streamlined Huey ready to convert......

Into this! A clean and simple design that is perfect for a machine master like Ross to use. You can see the process he went through to make the cover on his page (Southpaw Machine) What he doesn't tell you is that it took him a LOT of work to take my image and get it into his software and configure it for milling as well as getting the lettering to work right and line up to work with the holes needed to mount the cover on the bike. Ross went above and beyond for me and he'll do it for you too, but it won't be cheap. It WILL be beautiful though and completely custom.

Here is the finished cover, ready to mount.

Here it is on the bike. I LOVE it! The slight tilt to the lettering makes it work with the mounting holes AND flows with the angle of the aircraft making it all look like its flying.

Another view.

Ross also made me this timer cover a while back. I had asked him if he could do the HD #1 logo and next thing I know he's handing me this with not only that logo, but my name in it as well. I painted it, so don't hold that against Ross ;-)

This is an aircleaner cover Ross made for Chopper Ed. He was a helicopter pilot in the Army and flew Hueys and Chinooks.

This timer cover was made for Tim, if you're Army or ex-Army you'll recognize it. If you're not you won't care, but the point is that the work is amazing. Check out Ross' blog and contact him if you want some truly custom machine work for your bike, Stock or chopped he doesn't care. CALL HIM!!!

Radio Controlled Helicopter Fly In

Saturday before I hung out with the GarCo crew I met some of my buddies from the Southern Cruisers and we took a nice 50 mile ride to get to an R/C helicopter fly in that was about 5 miles from my house. It was a beautiful morning and we ended up having a good time. Most of the helicopters are the spindly little stunt type but my favs were the realistic models of real helicopters. Of course since I was a Crewchief oh UH-1 Hueys for almost 10 years when I was in the Army that's to be expected.

We got a good parking spot right by the flight line.

Bad ass OH-58D replica turns in for the attack.

The detail on this model was incredible!

Video of it flying.

Nice Huey model. I didn't get to see it fly, but it sure looked good. He even had G.I. Joe type figures inside for realism.

You can see it's a replica of a B model, but I still liked it even if I crewed H models.

SUPER detailed Jet Ranger (civilian version of the OH-58) getting ready to fly. 

This aircraft was super detailed right down to the interior having seatbelts both front and rear as well as all the doors and cowling working like the real thing. He also uses an electric motor so that it has that cool whine like a turbine engine. I was super impressed with this one.

Once again I was blown away by the realism of this model. Check it out starting up and flying around. By the way, the rotor did not really slow down and start turning backwards it is a trick of the video. I told the owner that he should go out to the Talledega Nat. Forest and fly over the pot fields to mess with the growers out there, He said he would but he was afraid they'd shoot it down.