KarTunes | 2008 H-D Road King Classic

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There are always huge expectations from your first bike to be cool, fast, and one of a kind. Not long after you get a new bike you start to think about changing things. The paint job that caught your eye in the first place starts to look like every other bike so you have to try to change things up. You start adding some fresh chrome, different exhaust, and crazy wheels, then you save your nickels and go for the custom paint. Same old story right, so what makes this bike any different? Well this too, is John Wimmer’s first Harley and like most first timers he started out with swapping out the stock wheels for an aftermarket set.

When John bought the bike, a ‘08 H-D 105th Anniversary Road King Classic, it was the colors and medallions that made him love the bike. John thought that all the bike needed was a fresh set of wheels and that’s all. He really did want to keep the bike stock, he felt that it was going to be a collector’s item some day.

It didn’t take long before John couldn’t take all the ribbing he was getting about the stock paint and its colors, everything from the big brown worm to the rolling Duracell battery. John was a professional painter by trade; the only thing was he painted big commercial buildings not motorcycles. He made up his mind and started calling around to a few shops to see who could help him change the stock look and color with out losing the special feeling of owning one of the Anniversary model bikes.

Just when John was about to give up on the idea to give the Road King a makeover, he came across a shop called KarTunes in Sterling, Virginia not far from where he lived. They were looking to repaint the inside of their shop and happened to call John’s company for a quote. He had used KarTunes in the past to get some stereo work done on his cars and knew that they did good work. John did not know that they also had a great reputation for all the work they had done on motorcycles. So John struck up a deal with Dan the owner of KarTunes to swap a paint job on the shop for a paint job and stereo work on his Road King.

John started on painting the shop about the same time as Dan started to strip down John’s bike removing all the sheetmetal and a few stock parts. A call was put into Dead Center Cycles and a basic blank fairing was ordered to handle the sound system John was after. It was going to need paint, so Dan had to get it and get it mocked up first. Dan was going to do the basic stereo with two speakers and call it a day, but then realized all the work John was putting into painting the shop and felt he should step up and do the same. So the fairing was fitted with a 7-inch Alpine touch screen media center. The head unit handles AM/FM/CD/DVD/XM Radio and has a port for an iPod. It is all is hooked up to a set of handlebar controls donated from an Ultra Classic Dan had parted out in the shop. He bolted the controls to a set of 12-inch Chubby apes from Wild 1.

The head unit pumps out sound with a 200-watt Alpine amp and a set of Alpine marine speakers. Everything is concealed in the fairing and the fairing is still detachable in a matter of seconds. The fairing and bodywork were sent to Kenny Dean in Fredericksburg, Virginia to do the paint. Once he had a few test panels together John picked what is the current color scheme which happens to still have the same feel as the factory H-D 105th Anniversary paint. Then Kenny applied the graphics to the bike and it was brought back to the shop.

It was just about the time John was done with painting the building that the paint for his bike was showing up. As Dan and his team were getting John’s bike back together they all started to think that the bike needed some different wheels and handlebars. And the stock seat had to go. John liked the look of spoke wheels and big white walls, so he called Sam at Ride Wright Wheels and ordered a set of 18-inch 50- spoke Fat Daddy wheels. John had them build the wheels with pure white hoops with chrome hubs, spokes, and spoke nipples just to give the illusion of a white wall. Of course matching rotors were attached and the factory calipers were replaced with Performance Machine 4-piston pieces front and rear. The bike was then lowered 1-inch for a more proper stance.

The next thing was the seat. John liked the feel and comfort of the H-D seat just not the look: it was plain, black, smooth, and looked like every other H-D Road King seat. So he wanted something exotic. John stopped by the shop one day holding an envelope full of material samples from LePera. There was talk of using crocodile, ostrich, or snake, even the skin of a dead Oompa Loompa, whatever else they could find to fit the look of the bike. The kind folks at LePera sent out an unwrapped seat blank to be measured up and sent back so they could cover it in whatever John picked. They all came to an agreement that orange crocodile inlay would be the best choice to flow with the fresh paint scam.

Once Dan had all the paint back at the shop, the bike was put back together in just a few days. At the start of this project John was looking to just change out the paint but before he knew it like so many before him, once he get started on that one little thing it can become a new bike if not a new looking bike in no time at all. The work that went into the new fairing, wheels, bars, and seat, were no little task, but to John it was not too much, enough to feel like a new bike with new toys, but still the 105th Anniversary Road King Classic he fell in love with. Now it looks and sounds better too. B

Spec Sheet