In a basement shop in Newtown Square, Jack Weidmayer spent three years building a deep-purple Harley-Davidson Panhead chopper from scrap parts and swap-meet finds.
Now the bike is competing on an international stage for a $10,000 prize, writes Mike Newall for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Weidmayer, 27, gave the motorcycle classic chopper styling, a Wassell Banana gas tank, and merlot-colored acrylic-glass fins that create sharklike shadows in the sun.
The build earned him a finalist spot in the Biltwell People’s Champ, a crowd-voted competition run by the Southern California company to spotlight grassroots builders, and Weidmayer fit the description.
“I was super surprised to even get in,” he said.
A Villanova communications graduate, he works as a machinist at a West Chester tool company and picked up the craft during the pandemic.
His teacher was his father, Mark, a former Harley-Davidson mechanic and custom-bike builder who supervised the project but credits the design entirely to his son.
The two have spent years together in the small basement shop, where Jack has built eight bikes using little more than scrap, salvage, and basic hand tools.
This was his most heavily modified yet, and he said little of it went according to plan.
Weidmayer calls himself an underdog in the online vote, especially against builders with far larger social media followings.
Finalists will ride their creations to Cook’s Corner before the winner is named, with a display spot at Harley-Davidson’s Born Free show also on the line.
The purple chopper has already carried a Delco basement project onto a much bigger stage.
“I’ve had that idea in my head for three years now, and it is incredible to see it completed,” he said.
Readers can cast a vote for Weidmayer’s chopper in the People’s Champ competition using this link.
The complete Philadelphia Inquirer story has the full account of how a Newtown Square basement produced a People’s Champ finalist.
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