ONTARIO, CANADA
A used snowmobile and dirt bike shop (with a little bit of a street bike salvage yard) may not necessarily be the place you would expect someone to be building custom Victory choppers, but Dave Todd of Spoiled Sports in Bowmanville, Ontario may very well be the exception to this thought.
“I always had a love of tinkering with motors since I was a kid with my mini bikes and snowmobiles. I spent a few years as a machinist before starting my own business about 20 years ago,” Dave said.
In 1994, Spoiled Sports became a Polaris dealer and focused the business to the snowmobile, ATV, and PWC product lines that Polaris carried at that time. Though Dave was excited when Polaris introduced the Victory Motorcycle brand, he held back and waited a few years before bringing that line in. “We just wanted to get the public’s reaction and feedback to these bikes.”
When Dave, and factory-trained technicians Rich and Dave (aka Doo), set the stage for a custom build, it was only natural that a Victory motorcycle would have a strong role in the project.
The frame for the bike proved to be a challenge, “How the frame would cradle the engine and its ability to handle the torque that the engine produced had to be re-engineered. The rear drive and brake system also had to be heavily modified to deal with the torque as well.” Dave continued, “Back when we built this bike, there was next to nothing on the shelf to customize a Victory so we had to modify just about everything to fit and make work.”
The bike’s steering neck was modified to fit the Harley front-end, while in the back, the rear suspension had to be modified to work with the Victory factory Fox shock. “The Victory suspension works on an upper mount system, not a lower mount system like the Harley has.”
To get the fuel where it’s needed, the EFI system required heavy modification of two different electrical systems to get it to work effectively. The intake system required moving the throttle body from the top of the engine to sticking out the left side of the engine under the fuel tank. A custom seat pan was molded and bowed to fit over the shock, and the front fender was hand molded so that no spacers were required for mounting it, keeping it nice and clean.
“I started with the rims I liked,” Dave commented on the bike’s beginning. “Because of the webs in the wheels, we tried to incorporate the spider web in the machining of parts, including water jet cutting webs into the shifter rod and a spider web in the front frame section.”
Candy Tangerine from House of Kolor, laid on by Jimmy Burk and final airbrush work by ‘Barry’ effectively ties everything together.
Since this first one rolled out of the shop, Spoiled Sports has built quite a few outstanding custom Victory’s and all of them are as nice as this one that emerged from those spider web wheels.
Spoiled Sports
1898 Baseline Road
Bowmanville, Ontario L1C 3K3
905-436-6487
www.spoiledsports.com
