Justin McNeely has had fuel coursing through his veins since he started racing 4-wheel ATVs when he was five (he’s almost 40 now). These traits may have been genetic since, as a baby, Justin was going to races to watch his uncle drag race cars, and in the 1950s, way before he was born, his grandmother and grandfather raced stock cars in the dirt. (And it is said that his grandmother was the better of the two!)
Justin’s custom motorcycle building goes nearly 15 years, to when he put together a shop in the basement of his house. His skills developed quickly, as did his sense of style. For most of this time, his day job involved working behind the counter as a service writer at the local Ford dealership, but then about five years ago, he was offered a job at a hot rod shop thanks to his excellent fabrication skills. Figuring he was tired of trying to make other people happy from behind a counter, and building hot rods seemed like it would be much more fun, he took the job. He now does everything from building chassis’ to shaping metal (a new skill) to mounting quarter panels. Even though he fabricates hot rods all day at work, he still works in his basement fabricating beautiful custom motorcycles at home.
This 74 cubic inch 1954 Harley-Davidson Panhead is the third custom build Justin created for my annual “Motorcycles as Art” exhibition series, with this one being made for the “What’s the Skinny” iteration. Justin was the perfect match for this theme on skinny bikes since his first thought when imagining any new build is to consider how he can make the bike skinnier and more streamlined. Then as he starts the build, he takes parts, even those already narrowed, and somehow makes them even more slender. Figuring out how the bike will come together is what Justin enjoys doing the most.
For the “Holy Roller,” as he named this bike, Justin narrowed the stock horseshoe oil tank and tightened up the shell of the Sportster fuel tank before fitting them on the stretched Knucklehead frame. This bike is also “de-raked”, Justin’s third such custom, which is fitting for someone who lives just 100 miles from St. Louis, the epicenter of “De-Rakers” thanks to some extent to Cycle Showcase’s Randall Noldge and his well-known “Mantis” de-raked chopper. Justin finds that de-raking a chopper makes it handle better and more able to ride fast on the windy, hilly, and fun roads of SE Missouri, where he lives.
Justin has a few features on this tight little rigid that he’s particularly fond of, like the beautifully detailed rear fender that started life on a stock Sportster, and the wheels, which have become one of Justin’s signatures since he loves aluminum wheels with shoulders. Then there is the Hurst shifting lever that came out of an old Mustang from his Dad and the shift knob atop it that Justin salvaged from an old Mac dump truck parked at a place he worked some years ago. The purple paint was also a favorite, as Justin expected it would be since it was applied by Shawn Long of Imperial House Paint, who painted two other bikes from Justin (and purple happens to be Justin’s favorite color!)
Since finishing his ’54 Pan, and in addition to building his own house and shop out in the countryside 120 miles south of St Louis, Missouri, Justin helped his wife finish her de-raked Sportster chopper, and he’s been working on his own 1965 Ford Fairlane that he’s turning into a gasser. As for his next bike, it will be a dirt track racer that will surely work great on the track, and I’ll bet it will show just as well. Based on what we’ve seen from Justin in just a short few years, I expect we’ll be seeing many more exceptional builds in the years to come.
Follow Justin on IG @ratfink44.
In 1979, Easyriders started to publish some of Michael’s motorcycle photography. He photographed a number of smaller events and features specifically for them, proved his abilities and then was off on his third trip to Sturgis in 1981, now on assignment for Easyriders, for whom he has returned there ever since. Also in 1981, after a solo exhibition of his work at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, Ireland, which was boycotted by the League of Decency, Michael became disillusioned with the “art world” and again changed course. He stopped publicly exhibiting his photographs in favor of publishing his motorcycle work in Easyriders and simultaneously began developing his career as a commercial advertising and corporate photographer. By 1982, his studio was open in Boulder, Colorado. It wasn’t long before he developed a clientele that included companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Kraft Foods.
- Heading to Tōhoku – An Annual Trek to Meet Japanese Customizers - March 13, 2026
- Motoverse, the Annual Celebration of Everything Royal Enfield - December 30, 2025
- Freedom Behind Bars: The Party at the Pen East - November 14, 2025