In our Ride of the Week series, we recently took a look at two custom mini-bikes built by Greg Castillo of Skidmark Garage, a community motorcycle workshop in the heart of downtown Cleveland. The garage hosts members who pump out cool motorcycles all the time, many of them fully custom or vintage projects bikes that simply needed some love. We found an interesting looking motorcycle on the show floor of the Piston Powered Auto-Rama, and who better to show it off to us than the owner of Skidmark Garage, Brian Schaffran.
Schaffran isn’t the owner of the bike, but rather showing it off for the true builder, Dave Nolan. Nolan is a mainstay member of Skidmark known for building some crazy cool custom bikes. He also supports Schaffran’s Motogo Cleveland program, a 501c3 non-profit organization that strives to “bring back shop class” by teaching kids mechanical skills through motorcycle maintenance and repair.
On first glance, it might look like Nolan’s bike is something straight out of Mad Max, but in reality, it’s a vintage Harley-Davidson Shovelhead with a myriad of cool additions that aren’t your typical bike parts.
The bike’s name – Junk N Disorderly – wasn’t initially what it was called. It was initially called “Drunk N Disorderly,” a play on an accident that occurred around 30 years ago where Nolan lost his leg. Now, 30 years sober, he rides his motorcycle with one real leg and one fake. His sobriety and the fact that he’s put so many clever, random parts onto the bike, which represent the trash-to-treasure theme of the build, made the Junk N Disorderly name more fitting.
The base of the motorcycle is an amalgamation of Detroit Brothers frames encapsulating a Harley-Davidson Shovelhead engine, which was chopped up to look more like a knucklehead. The seat is fashioned from 18-wheeler tires found on the side of the freeway, and the brake fluid is held by an 1800s medicine canister. A number of other wacky additions make Nolan’s custom build a site to see!
If you have a motorcycle, ATV, UTV, snowmobile or jet ski you’d like to feature in MPN’s Ride of the Week series, please email MPN Content Director Greg Jones at [email protected].
