Built to work,
not to look like it
Engines, suspension, wheels, custom parts and studded tires out of a small shop in North Jackson, Ohio.
Curt on his 1981 Yamaha YZ465, number 1 plate up, alongside a very fast Maico 490 — AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days, the largest gathering of vintage motorcyclists in the world.
2015 · 2018 · 2019 · 2021 · 2023
AMA National Champion — vintage hare scrambles and motocross
One bike. One rider. Twelve years, three variations of the build, and it’s still winning.
All the credit goes to the rider. The engine and the suspension just didn’t let him down.
Engine and suspension both built here, every year of it.
2015 AMA Off-Road Vintage Grand Championships, Mid-Ohio — first place in motocross and hare scrambles, two national champion plates in one weekend.
Most shops sell you the biggest number they can find. Peak horsepower, maximum stud count, the stiffest spring in the catalog. Those numbers win arguments on forums.
Responsible builds and tunes win more races. That’s the whole approach here, and it’s the same reasoning whether it’s a cylinder head, a shim stack or a tire.
Engine Building
Power that holds together
Dirt bike and ATV engines, including dyno-proven spec engine competition. We’ve made unreal power out of motors never designed to produce it — and more often, made the responsible version that finishes the race.
Anyone can build one fast motor. Keeping a 1981 air-cooled two-stroke on national podiums for twelve years, through three builds and a rider who is genuinely hard on equipment, is a different kind of work.
2014 Camp Cattail Vintage HS, Chillicothe Enduro Riders. An air-cooled 1981 two-stroke, still winning overall.
Thanks Ambrose Kalasky and k3 offroad for this overall win.
Curty Guisler — Camp Cattail, May 2014
It helps to have a wild man willing to hang on to the bars. Good ride man.
Ambrose, in reply
Suspension
Revalving, lowering, retrofits
Setup matched to the rider and the terrain, not a generic spec. Lowering done with internal limiter kits so the suspension still works. And retrofits — fitting components to bikes they were never meant to fit.
Putting stuff where it doesn’t belong, while making it work better than ever intended.
A 2020 Sherco 300, brand new at the time, with a custom-ordered Öhlins front fork and nobody who had lowered one yet. Two inches out of it, front and rear, with no precedent to work from and parts expensive enough that there was no room to guess.
Wheel Building
Laced, trued, done right
New builds, rebuilds and respokes. We build wheels for several local dealerships — shops that would rather hand the job to someone who does it every week than tie up a tech for an afternoon.
With new parts, I’ll get a wheel straighter than some people get a crankshaft.
Wheels ship well, so this one isn’t limited to Ohio either.
Color work with our powdercoating partners, Screaming Turtle Specialty Coatings and Proudfoot Powersports.
Design & engineering
Parts built for your problem
3D CAD design, 3D scanning, reverse engineering and prototyping. If the part you need doesn’t exist, or exists badly, it can be designed around your machine and your application — the way a factory works bike gets its parts.
Studded tires
Winter traction, built here
Hand-built studded tires for riders who don’t park the bike in November. Nobody’s tire is right for every rider, so we don’t sell just one. We stud proven tires — IRC, Dunlop, or whatever you already run — and match the stud and the pattern to the riding you actually do.
Pick the tire you trust. We’ll stud it right.
Studded tires fail one way: the stud works loose. The usual fix is a stiffer compound to hold it, and stiff compounds crack. We build on tires with the tread volume to anchor a stud in rubber instead, so the compound doesn’t have to do the holding.
That’s also what sets the count. It isn’t about fitting in as many studs as possible — it’s about where each one sits. Every stud needs rubber behind it, which means staying back from the edge of the tread block. A block with real volume will take several and support all of them. Crowd them toward the edges and you get a bigger number on the spec sheet and studs with nothing holding them in.
The named builds are the ones we make most, not the only ones. Not a copy, a choice: adventure tires, odd sizes, a tread pattern you already run and want kept — bring the tire, tell us how you ride, and we’ll work out the stud and the pattern that suits it.
Parts
The stuff you need, on the shelf
Thousands of parts available through the store, with a distributor catalog behind it running to a half million part numbers. More items and new vendors added regularly, with warehouses spanning the continent. If it isn’t listed, ask — it can almost certainly be pulled.
You don’t have to be in Ohio
Suspension and wheels both travel. With a spec sheet and some information about you, the bike and how you ride, mail-in suspension service works on practically any make or model. Wheels just need to arrive.
Engine and design work usually starts with a conversation. Call and describe the problem.
Dealers welcome — we already handle wheel work for shops that would rather not tie up a tech with it.
Tell us what you’re working on
Straight answers, from the person who’d be doing the work.