Thursday, December 29, 2011

fourth installment of 1969 AEE catalog

HAPPY NEW YEARS!   FROM THE GREATEST CHOPPER COMPANY IN THE WORLD.....AEE CHOPPERS.





Wednesday, December 28, 2011

third installment of the 1969 first AEE catalog

Hope someone out there is checking this stuff out! Nice picture of the first AEE springer sitting on a box. You will note AEE never liked slugs and some people called us and others criminals for selling them. Reality is they are safe used correctly. You can see in the catalog they have specific directions of usage.




Tuesday, December 27, 2011

more 1969 first AEE catalog

I took a few days off but here are some more pages of the very first catalog AEE ever produced:




Thursday, December 22, 2011

part 2 of the 1969 AEE catalog

Next four pages...how does a fully painted tank, fender and frame for a couple hundred bucks sound? Rake neck for $25? Enjoy!



Wednesday, December 21, 2011

First AEE catalog 1969

Over the next week or so I am going to post every page of the first 1969 catalog, actually November 1968 (there were actually two catalogs in 1969, more on that later). I do this more for archive purposes than anything else. Many of the pages were taken straight out of the MCM catalog as an example. first up is the frotn and back covers.

Rose McMullen with the famous Corvair Trike and Boomer the shop lion. The back cover is Tom's Mindbender shot at what looks like the Fullerton airport. The Mindbender is the chopper that started it all and the first bike with a fully molded yet removable tank. Also one of the first street choppers with a fully chromed engine.


Thursday, December 15, 2011

Denvers Choppers

Denvers Choppers built a lot of bikes in it's day. Kayelynn with Dream Machines over in Kingman, AZ has made it his duty to find and restore Denver's bikes where ever he can find them. I have seen some of them, and heard them run too. Great pieces, some restored, some left alone but all great pieces of 70's chopper history. A few have some AEE items on them but eventually Denver began building lots of his own parts. I post this here for Kayelynn and to salute his efforts saving our collective chopper past!

Friday, December 9, 2011

AEE at it's peak!

Never thought I'd find this picture but here it is...I helped set this up, rolled the bikes out and helped with the shot.....rear row left to right Corvair Trike and the mighty Big Twin, front row, The Shovelhead, Mindbender, Really and Supersport. These are the bikes that existed when I arrived at AEE (though Big Twin was red at the time). Not long after this shot the Corvair Trike was won in a contest, Big Twin sold to the show circuit and Mindbender was sold to person unknown.....enjoy the only shot of this many AEE bikes in one picture that I am aware of......

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

A fan's AEE story....

Dave Brackett our talented designer/engineer/fabricator  received this recently from a fan of AEE and Molly:

Dave
I've really enjoyed reading your AEE & Molly histories. I grew up in Placentia Ca. AEE was just down the street and I went there many times with friends that were building Choppers. The first time I went to AEE it was still in Anaheim and I remember seeing Big Twin with those tires all the way across the rear. It was the most radical thing I had ever seen. I don't believe it was finished when I saw it. All the other trips were to the Placentia Location. I remember being a little freaked out when Rose came to the counter. Turns out she new more about Chopper parts than we did. In the early 70's a lot of my friends built or bought Choppers. Two of them were painted by Molly. My neighbor, Frank, traded a Triumph 650 for a really nice 59 Panhead Chopper. Shortly after he laid it down on the 57 freeway. He wasn't hurt but the bike didn't fair to well. He tore the bike down and sent the tank,fender and frame to Molly for paint. I went with him several times to check out the progress on the paint. On one trip another friend of mine decided to light his pipe in the shop. The fender was sitting on a 55 gallon drum. After lighting his pipe he threw the match into the drum. The fumes in the drum ignited and blew the fender across the shop. After Molly threw us out of the shop he brought out the fender which just had silver flake on it. There was a small crack in the Bondo at the tip of the fender and he told my friend that he wasn't going to fix it. That crack was there for the life of the bike. When He brought everything home I thought that paint job was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I helped Frank assemble the bike and he let me borrow it whenever I wanted.
I didn't build anything back then. Well a few years ago I decided to build a clone of Frank's Panhead. I had taken a lot of pictures of his bike so I made enlargements to use as a guide. I found a 60 Panhead in the Cycle Trader that had been chopped in 1970. The guy finished it and hardly ever rode it. The bike made the March 72 cover of Cycle World's Special Choppers Magazine. It was in great shape but was ugly ! He bought most of the parts at AEE including the springer. The rest of the parts were purchased at Cheatah Choppers in Santa Ana. I took it all apart and built my clone. The springer is the original chrome. I copied the Molly paint job from the pictures I had. I spent days tapeing out the designs that he probably did in hours. His paint jobs were epoxy but I used House Of Kolors urethane. It's really a nice bike to ride and I was surprised how well the springer works. Most Choppers were hard tails but Franks wasn't and at 60 I can't ride a hardtail. I attached three pictures. One of the clone, another of my paint and finally one of the originally Molly job. Thanks for taking time to read this. I could have gone on for pages. Thanks again for the website.
 
Art Holling



 and thanks to Art for confirming that our chrome and springers were the best!

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