The Tuttles from American Chopper
The Nascar races each week are my favorite thing to watch on TV, but I really love anything to do with speed, tools, and horsepower. I really enjoy “American Chopper”, the show about the motorcycle shop in New York state, Orange County Choppers. Ever since the pilot, where the Tuttles build the “Jetbike”, I have been a fan, watching every episode. The upcoming new season of ”American Chopper” got me thinking about how important and significant this TV show (of all things) has been to my life.
Yes, I am the webmaster of this website, The Speedzine. In addition to administrating this site, I also have my own personal site and blog, as well as other web ventures and projects in the works. Coming out of high school, I thought that journalism and photography was going to be my career. As life happened, things changed. Web design and photography became my hobbies instead of my job and I went into the military and became a fabricator. Let me tell you how the reality show “American Chopper” is the reason I grind metal instead of shoot pictures for a living.
Anyone that reads the posts on The Speedzine knows that I am, above all, a Nascar racing nut. I love the sport and carry it in my life everyday. From the drive to work to the final check of my Twitter feed before I go to bed I live racing. I’ve always said that racing is not a sport, it’s a lifestyle. I first became a fan of this lifestyle in 1994, going to FIve Flags Speedway here in Pensacola, Florida with my Dad and some childhood friends. Watching the Late Models circle the high banked short track gave me the racing bug, and it’s stuck ever since.
When I got into high school, I developed and new love and passion. Journalism and photography. SInce then, I’ve always tinkered with writing, picture taking, designing and the like. As I mentioned before, I thought that the arts was going to be my career path. I enlisted in the Air Force.
When came time to pick my Air Force job, the recruiter told me that to be journalist or photographer, I would have to do so later on in my career. There were no openings for the field straight out of boot camp. Since I would have to wait, that meant that I would still need to pick a job. The recruiter asked me a few questions about what I liked to do, gave me books and brochures to read, and reviewed my ASVAB score and what his computers said the Air Force needed.
At some point, while browsing all the jobs available, something about motorcycles came up in discussion. It was 2003, and choppers were all the rage on TV. To be honest, I don’t really remember how American Chopper came up, but it did, and the recruiter saw that I was interested in making motorcycles. In actuality, I was more interested in building racecars, but I digress. It wasn’t long into our chat when he showed me a page in one of the job books for a field called Aircraft Structural Maintenance. That’s fancy Air Force jargon for Aircraft Sheet Metal Fabricator. And that’s exactly what a structural maintenance troop does. He/she fixed anything sheet metal, carbon fiber, fiberglass, paint, or plastic on an airplane. We fix the bones and skin of the planes.
The recruiter used the show American Chopper to help explain what being a sheet metal mechanic was like. The tactic worked. When I signed up, I signed up to be a fabricator, fixin’ airplanes. At the time, I thought it would just be temporary, until an opening in the journalism or photography fields became available.
Six years later, and now out of the Air Force, I am still fabricating metal components for aircraft. I found that I love pounding on metal just as much, if not more than writing. The whole concept of with blood (literally), sweat and tears, creating something out of nothing. I love the tools, the smells, the sounds, the sparks. Metal fabrication is awesome. Through sheet metal work, I can relate to the Nascar fabricators that build racecars. I can relate to the Tuttles, who created outrageous custom motorcycles. I feel a kinship to the iron worker that built the skyscraper. I feel like the American that builds our country.
I owe all of this; my joy, my passion, my lively-hood, to a TV show of a bunch of guys welding steel tubes together. American Chopper may be more about the Tuttle family feud, but for me, it’s about the fabrication. I remember watching before I became a fabricator, thinking about how cool it was that they could build such cool bikes. Now, I watch the same episodes and think about how not only can I now do what they do too, I think about how I can do it better. Plus, I think about the possibilities of maybe someday building racecars for a Nascar team. How cool would that be! All from a TV show.
