fourth installment of 1969 AEE catalog

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

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.

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:

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!

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.

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!

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......

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!

7Up Triumph once again

Another shot of one of two 7UP Triumphs built for 7UP Bottling of Los Angeles. One was a 650 and the other a 500. Gorgeous Molly paint in 7UP green (sorry about the black and white the green was incredible). Bikes were pretty much all AEE catalog items. One notable exception is the sissy bar had 7UP spelled out on it (you can just see the bottom of it in the photo) At that time period we sold a tremendous amount of parts for the Triumphs. I always loved the crossing upsweep pipes, Beautiful flow to them.

Roth

A picture of the famous AEE Corvair Trike and Ed Roth's 45 trike in front of Roth's place in May wood. Tom McMullen had known Roth for some time and had bought his famous Knucklehead from Roth. This picture is from the first issue of Street Chopper. They did a pseudo head to head competition with the trikes. Reality is the Corvair would eat teh45 for lunch but it made for a good story! If only we could find the Corvair Trike! You guys in LA need to start looking, it's hiding down there somewhere.

Pink floyd

This is one of 4 Pink Floyd choppers built with lots of AEE parts. I am trying to get more info on the bikes. They were built for an early Pink Floyd tour in Europe.

Mirror

I am restoring an old iron cross mirror like we sold at AEE. We bought these from a vendor and did not make them. The arm slid in to the back of the head and utilized 2 set screws to tighten the arm in to the head. Compared to some of the plastic and cheap crap today this is a quality piece even if pretty much useless as a mirror.This mirror was in decent shape but needs the stem rechromed and I am prepping it for fresh black wrinkle paint. We sold this mirror and a crescent shape and a few others but this was the most popular by a wide margin.

AEE Square springer

This is a crappy shot of an AEE springer I have (in the shot it looks like the front legs have twist to them. They don't, it's a reflection off my balding head or something). It has the wrong rockers on it. They are the fishtail style that went on the round springer's instead of the crescents that went on square springers. However you could buy each style rocker separately so perhaps that's how these got on there. Its in good shape but I will disassemble and get it re-chromed for use on a future project. it even has the correct nut covers on it which are tough to come by these days.

Me and the man himself....Carroll Shelby

Took this shot 15 years ago...me and Carroll and one of his USRRC Cobras behind us.  Has nothing to do with motorcycles but just love them Shelby's. When I was in high school we used to go down to LAX and check out Shelby's factory and his Goodyear shop. Never forget once I was out behind the Goodyear place (at the east end of LAX) and here sits a transporter with GT40's on it! Unreal stuff.
The day this picture was taken I bent down and whispered in his ear "thanks for the cars". He lit up like he had just won the lottery. Great moment for both of us!

AEE Square glide and my first day at AEE

This is a picture of the first square glide, it was part of an article about the glide in May 1971 Street Chopper. I went to work at AEE early in 1971 which is when this was shot. The guy on the left is Jim Clark who was with Tom off and on at AEE and Street Chopper and Street Rodder over the years. Probably knew Tom the longest of anyone and was part of the formation of AEE Choppers. The other guy in the picture is the guy that hired me, named Ralph. I post this as he hired me on friday night. I show up monday morning and he is not there. I stand around out front after all the employees file in and Tom asks me why I'm there. I tell him I got hired friday by Ralph. He says "well come on in, I fired him friday night!"......that was my welcome to AEE.

A DBL E

This is a mock up I am working on, note the cool ass license plate. The sissy bar is for mock up only as is the seat. Both are original AEE parts, Trip sissy bar and King and Queen seat.

Dave Brackett at work

Here is a shot of Dave with a little bit of AEE history....AEE frame that Dave designed and built for us, AEE square glide front end and an AEE mini drum. I took this a couple weeks ago up at Dave's place. Note the Kaiser Henry J in the background. Just one of Dave's toys. He is pointing to where the fork stops need to go on this build. More on it later. Don't you love his hydraulic work table?

AEE STORY!

If you go way back to the beginning of this blog there is a post by Dave Brackett telling the story of AEE. He just updated it and you might want to check it out to get the truth from the horse's mouth. Two thumbs up!

I NEED HELP!

We have been searching for quite some time for the AEE Choppers Corvair Trike. Now that the Big Twin is out of hiding we need to find the Trike. It was sold by the last owner to a person who was supposed to be restoring it in LA somewhere. How about some help finding it? Ask around, post on blogs, talk it up. Let's find it and if the owner isn't restoring it maybe we can!

some AEE coolness from JEFF WYATT

Jeff is a very kind fellow that made contact with me and sent me some superb posters (more on that later) and today I received a 42 year old sales receipt from AEE. And a credit back to him from AEE as he had overpaid. This is from the time period just as AEE was in transition from a chopper shop to chopper parts behemoth. Their first catalog came out in November 1968 so jeff was a very early catalog customer.

I'm pretty sure this would be the only receipt and credit that exist since most people aren't quite the pack rat Jeff must be! Thank god he is , that's all I can say. Enjoy the prices and a touch of greatness from back in the day.