Greg Socha used to hate Harleys. He was into bikes, but Motocross was his gig. He started his Galesburg, Michigan machine shop, GS Motor Company, back in 1993, and got interested in building customs around 1998. But looking at the state of things then with (in his words) "overblown, stretched-out billet barge garbage," he decided to hold off on his bike building ambitions. When the chopper boom happened, it opened his eyes to the modern re-invention of the old school style.
Ironically, this odd little shovel all came from a desire to conform to the norm. Greg was just starting in the business of building bike components and attending bike rallies, but he only had one bike to show his products on. Well, he thought, nobody rents out booth space with just one bike! So this budget shovel was born.
Unlike many builders who get super-detailed and design all the parts down to the valve stem covers, Greg took the opposite approach on this bike. It's just a simple rigid with an S&S shovel, a super-clean design with some strikingly bold strokes. Designed as a showcase for his parts, it's done up in very understated flat black, while all of the bright red anodized aluminum pieces are his own. In fact, most of those parts are left over from an aborted build Greg likes to call "Bike Zero," which was to be his first custom, but never even got started, remaining a pile of sheetmetal and tubing to this day.
This bike is fairly atypical of the bikes Greg builds today in that he bought many of the parts on it instead of just going ahead and building them. The V-Twin frame is the last one he bought since he brought his frame building in-house, and while he still uses telescopic front ends, most of Greg's current bikes feature his own monoshock springer. This bike does feature GS's very first vertical oil tank, which is now one of their most popular items.
True to his motocross roots, Greg used a Renthal Fat Bar perched in his own clamps and risers, with an MX-style quick-change throttle and businesslike levers. The pipes were bent in-house, a simple straight shot from each cylinder, as was the rear fender support. The flat black paint did get a little love in the form of some old-school pinstriping by painter Mike Helt. Other nice little touches include steel braided hoses all the way around, a glittery red Le Pera seat to match the anodizing and pinstriping, and wispy machined mounts to hold the V-Rod headlight.
Greg professes to have trouble balancing his twin goals of building unique one-off customs and manufacturing production-based bikes your average Joe can afford. We'd say he met his goal on many levels. A first place at Willy's Tropical Tattoo Show in the Hard Core class attests to the bike's appeal, while a sticker price of $15,995 makes it ridiculously affordable for a show-winning custom. Relying on clean design and do-it-yourself ingenuity to keep costs down, Greg exposes the six-figure bikes for the overkill that they are.