As After Dark Motorcycles tears into its fifth year of business, I did a quick count on the eight good friends that work full-time together with me at After Dark Motorcycles. I then calculated everyone’s actual time in the industry and got a total of 50 years of experience. This gives you a complete customer service-orientated motorcycle experience. One attitude we apply to the bikes in our shop is “think of the bike as your own” and with a genuine enthusiasm towards the repair, customizing, performance gain, and especially a complete bike build. This attitude is always received well by our customers.
With many years in Edmonton working on Harleys my partners and I felt as though we needed to build a few bikes of our own to build enough of a reputation to open our own shop. Prior to making our way over to the ‘dark side,’ we spent many hours working on our bikes ‘After Dark’ and soon we had enough of a customer base of our own that we were able to open our shop ‘After Dark Motorcycles’ in 2003.
In the winter of 2005 we had a bit of cash built up, so we thought we should build not one, but three shop bikes to sell. The small amount of money was gone quickly on the builds but all three projects still moved forward slowly. When the customer work-load became priority, the dwindling amount of attention to our projects cooled right off. This is the sting of working in the motorcycle trade. It takes someone with the passion for bikes to work in the industry. You work on bikes all day long, and many times into the wee hours of the night. You get to ride to work, but time to wrench on your bike and get some decent miles on becomes few and far between.
Anytime spent on the project bikes was late at night or just taken directly away from our busy schedules. Under-delivering on your own bike-build is unfortunate, but it is not usually received well when you pull a customers unfinished bike off the bench to replace with a build of your own. Four years later we have built 24 bikes, as well as maintained an incredibly busy service department.
Over the last year with good people helping with the customer work load, a commitment was made to get all three bikes done and the one you see featured on these pages is number 1 of 3 and it’s a true ‘After Dark Custom’ consisting of many After Dark, one-off parts. The fuel tank is pure art mixed with nothing but function, and also features our fuel bung, gas cap and internal cross over. The under tree designed bars that work perfectly with the tank, and the smooth top tree were thought up after a few drinks. The blue prints sketched on a cocktail napkin have now made their way onto our bike as a finished piece of art. The seat pan and rear fender mounting was done in a way to show off the clean battery area of one of our bull builds. Our wiring is one-off and very tidy. The paint colours were discussed and the gold was added, the logos underlining the paint were a suggestion by our painter, take a close look at the paint, it is phenomenal.
Let’s face it mid controls rule, but mating them to your primary can be tricky. We worked through it and then hacked up the BDL slab and anodized it black. The motor mount is another After Dark part as well as the custom pipes.
With all the cool projects we get involved with, everyone at the shop works together as a team. The team at After Dark Motorcycles hopes you dig our bike, which we has yet to be named, that’s because our next bike, a flat tracker styled, kick only, magneto pan shovel, has had us kicking our knees into a raw mess, and has already drawn its first blood.
After Dark Motorcycles
10581-107th Street
Edmonton, AB T5H 2Z9
780-441-3666
www.afterdarkcycles.com
