MY TIMES WITH MASTER BUILDER DOUG KEIM FROM CREATIVE CYCLES.

Post by Jack McIntyre, Images by Jack McIntyre, Doug Keim, and Dino Petrocelli.

This post is brought to you by Iron Trader News.

Have you ever taken a walk with someone and discussed, oh I don’t know, motorcycle engineering? Well I did… I had known Doug Keim from being at motorcycle events for a few years starting in the early 2000’s, but while at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida back in December of 2005, he and I took a stroll through the outdoor bike show and in that short period of time, I learned more about the engineering of a motorcycle and its frame, than I ever knew before. Doug was one of those gifted motorcycle builders that didn’t build motorcycles just to make it look crazy because he could, he built motorcycles that were based on engineering first, then the creative design fell into place after.

I decided to post this image first because it’s always been one of my favorite Doug Keim builds. It was build for the Hard Rock Roadhouse tour, and a luck winner was chosen at the Casino on Saturday evening. The bikes name, “Rock Hard”.

I’ll do a separate post on this bike in the near future. For this post, I want to focus on two other motorcycles that Doug created. “The Rising” as seen below, and “Agnes” the dark red beauty to follow.

The Rising was a 2005 Kawasaki Vulcan 2000 at one point. Doug then began to hand create the exhaust, frame, front end, bars, mirrors, and the seat.

As viewed above, you can see the amount of care and precision it took to turn this bike into a masterpiece, remember that word “engineering”, well there you go.

The final product. Have you ever seen anything quite like this? You won’t, believe me. Scan through the images below, take in each portion of the bike, the flow of it is incredible.

I had created a calendar back in the day, and you can understand why “The Rising” had to have it’s own month. I brought with me a pretty young gal from New Jersey for the photo shoot of which we did out front of the Atlantic City Convention Center.

Now, on to “Agnes”. Talk about another engineering masterpiece, this build is simply first class. Smooth from front to back, Doug and Jim Miller did all of the fabrication and assembly. Built in under 90 days, the long list of components used are the best of the best, Chip at APW did the gorgeous deep dark red paint work and there are so many great companies involved, I can’t even name them all.

Below are a few pics of the bikes early fabrication.

And the finished product. Again, look over the images for the details Doug added, the creativity, and more.

Last, I’ll leave you with a few videos taken at the time, of Agnes being built. These have been on YouTube for many years, so keep that in mind with today’s hi-res displays. Creative Cycles in no longer in New Jersey, Umatilla Florida is & has been for many years now, where Doug is located. He’s still doing amazing work on motorcycles, and some very high end bikes I must say. Go to Creative Cycles (https://creativecycles.com/) for much more.