The Build by Paul Teutul Jr

Author:Paul Teutul Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

When the show started, I fought hard regarding our look and feel in the licensing of products. Styles tend to trend, and skulls, spades, and dog heads were popular at the time. We were receiving pressure from licensing experts to be trendier in our products, and my father liked their ideas. But I didn’t want us to cave to the pressure. I didn’t have problems with skulls, for instance, but I didn’t think they fit our brand. I wanted to protect our brand and not just follow whatever trend was popular at the time. I wanted us to be consistent with our look.

I was a stickler about our brand because I felt like my part in the company was the brand creatively. I contributed the creative to the business, with the bikes I designed and the logo I created. OCC’s look and feel began with what I was producing, and that dated to before the show. I was conscious of my creative flare and how our products and logo said who we were as a company. Our bikes were different from those of other builders, and it was important to me all along to maintain our identity.

For the most part, my father left the licensing matters to me, and I managed our brand until I left the company. It wasn’t more than a few months after I was gone that skulls started appearing on basically everything related to OCC.

More and more, with each season, my father seemed to listen to me less and less. My father invested close to a million dollars in a failed attempt to create a process that would make a powder coat look like chrome. To appreciate why this would have been amazing but also impossible, you have to understand the difference between chrome and a powder coat.

Powder coat is a coating system like paint that gets baked onto the bike parts. In powder coating, the metal is positively charged and the powder, which is negatively charged, is sprayed onto the metal. The negative charge causes the powder to stick to the metal, which is then baked at a high temperature. Ultimately, powder coat looks like paint, except it is much more durable.

Chrome is a three-stage plating process. The chrome is dipped into a tank with ingots like copper, nickel, and then chrome. Chrome cannot be duplicated on metal any other way.

Powder coating is color based, and we match the powder coat to the paint job. The final chrome product has a mirror finish. Powder coat is a great method for providing durability on a frame, and finding a way to have a chrome look with a powder coat’s durability would be a significant technological advance; it would save time and a lot of money.

My father talked with some guy who was working on a super-chrome process that would give powder coat that chrome look. We never really understood the guy’s formula, but he said he was about 90 percent of the way to figuring out the process, so my father decided to invest in his idea.

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