 The last few day have been unbelievable. A few months ago, my good friend Buzz Kanter from American Iron and I had spoke about bringing his 1948 Panhead down to Wheels Through Time to get her all fixed up and running a story in his magazine about the project. The bike hadn’t run in who knows how long, and at one time or another, had been improperly restored with lots of shiny chrome and a bad paint job. Since the bike was already together, we decided, instead of restoring the bike, we’d instead make it run like a top and look like it had been sitting for 60-some-odd years. And since there’s no technical name for this process, we decided to call it a “crustoration”.
Well, Buzz and his pal Jim showed up on Monday morning ready to get to work. I had my son, Matt, and my friend Matt Olsen, from Aberdeen, SD jump in on the project with some much needed help.
When we unloaded the bike, it looked to be in operable condition, so my first thought was to put in some gas and fire it up. That we did, and as you can guess, we got it running in about 20 min. It smoked like a chimney, so, after a bit of conversing, we diagnosed the problem….worn piston rings.
We got the top-end torn down while the bike was still warm, which helped everything come a part a bit easier. After a thorough top-end rebuild, we had the bike nearly reassembled completely. At this point, we began swapping shiny parts for dull ones, and began working on the “incorrect” shiny blue paint, in an effort to “dirty it up a bit”. All that dirt and grime on the far corners of the shop came in handy for this.
After about a two days of parts swapping, repainting, and everything else 3 guys can do to a bike to make it a “runner”, we had it almost ready to go. Matt, Matt, and myself had put in about 40 hours a piece in 2 and a half days, and the work was really beginning to pay off. We had taken a 2-bit restoration and brought it to what looked like a barn-fresh, never touched, 1948 milestone motorcycle. It just shows you, when you get a bunch of guys to put their minds to making a motorcycle run great and look better, it’ll happen.
On the third day, we added a few finishing touches and prepped the bike for starting. After some still unexplained timing mishaps, the bike fired up on the first kick. What a machine.
 So test rides were in order, and each of us jumped on and gave it go. It didn’t take Matt Olsen long to get a little dirty, after what looked like a small mud puddle turned into a 10-inch deep mud pit. So when you hear the name, Mudpit Matt, now you know where it came from. We pulled the half submerged bike out of the mud and jumped back on for some more burnouts in the parking lot, and then sent Buzz and Jim on their way back to Connecticut. They left with exactly what they were looking for….a perfect running, older looking, dirty, original 1948 piece of true American Iron.
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*New “Classic Leatherbound” Longsleeve Tee
