Alright folks, crack yourself a cool one and settle back. Today’s tale concerns life deep down in the heart of the North Carolina countryside. Not only will we take a look at the Morton family and their successful business, Morton’s Custom Cycles, we’ll also learn a bit about how this purple-and-yellow-flamed chopper was cobbled together. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As always, it’s best to start from the beginning.

Behold Doug Morton, the 39-year-old mastermind behind MCC. He’s seen here (next page) sporting a yellow T-shirt, enviable sideburns, a goatee, and awe-inspiring amber-tint shades. According to MCC’s web site, Doug “intimidates blue hairs and small children.” However, long before he became such a legendary character, Doug was simply a boy toiling in his granddaddy’s old auction house, a rickety pole building standing on a patch of land that would one day accommodate MCC’s hallowed headquarters.

When Doug was in his teens and doing auto repair, he used that pole building as his first shop. An honest man, Doug is quick to point out that life back then was a little lean. “There was barely enough room to put one car,” he laughs through a rural Southern drawl as thick as molasses. “We ran a cord through the woods, off of a saw box, and that’s how we got electricity out there for about eight years. We had no air compressor and not much of anything. The entire overhead on that shop, if you could call it that, was $22 a month for the phone and power.” That jumped to $1,400 a month when they built the new building, on the same spot as the old one. But again, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Doug wrenched away in his granddaddy’s pole building for quite some time until he finally got a gig working at a Ford dealership. But that didn’t last long. “I quit that job when I was 20,” Doug states. “I had my toolbox paid for, 220 bucks in my pocket, and a pregnant wife, and I just said screw it. I’ll work for myself. It didn’t take but a few days before I thought I’d really messed up. It all worked out, though. Strangely enough, my wife has always been 100 percent behind me on this deal of mine.”

Among other things, Doug’s deal involved moving out of auto repair and into the motorcycle business, a feat that was eventually accomplished when he teamed up with his younger brother, Rodney. Legend has it that a plan was hatched one particularly well-lubricated afternoon, as the two sat cleaning a scooter and chewing the fat in the back of their granddaddy’s pole building. “I said to Rodney,” Doug recalls, “‘Why don’t you go to school and learn to do this motorcycle work the right way? And then I’ll build us a new shop, and we can go into business.’”

Fired up, Rodney had his momma call the American Motorcycle Institute (AMI) to secure him a spot in the school’s next semester. Doug, meanwhile, burned down the pole building and set about envisioning the structure that would propel him and his brother into the future. Thus Morton’s Custom Cycles was born — sort of. Doug had a tough time getting the permits to construct the new shop. So, when Rodney graduated from AMI and returned home, the brothers initially operated out of the back of a blown-out pickup truck that was parked in a field. Hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day, either.

Today MCC is a successful six-man operation consisting of the brothers, their daddy Doyt, business manager Laney Kiser, airbrush artist Scott Andrews, and mechanic Don Wompler. While the shop still does general repairs and work on all brands, metric bikes have become its bread and butter. Under the label M-Tric (as in “’em some trick bikes,” Doug reveals, “it’s sort of Redneck-ese”), MCC also does a bang-up business selling its own handlebars, pipes, and assorted parts to dealers and regular Joes the world over.

In other words, the lean years are most definitely a memory. But that doesn’t mean the brothers no longer respect the value of a buck. MCC may regularly put out high-dollar machines, but it also builds beautiful bikes for those on a budget. Take, for instance, the long-fork Kawasaki Vulcan gracing these pages.

“Jason [the bike’s owner] came in wanting an affordable chopper,” Rodney remembers. “He told us what he had in mind and what he hoped to spend. He then gave us a deposit, and we got to work.” First up, the crew found a wrecked bike, a common cost-cutting practice at MCC since the shop also does insurance appraisals. They cut off the front end of the junker and sawed clean one of the double backbone tubes, creating a single backbone. They then cut and fabricated the downtube to make the frame as high as it is. To that towering skeleton they attached an 8" over H-D Softail front end that they topped with their own M-Tric Z Bars.

To lend the Vulcan a Frisco feel, MCC went with a late-model Sporty can capped with a modified Cragar spinner pinched from a car wheel. Save for a little shaving here and there, the rest of the Vulcan tin remained largely untouched. The same goes for the engine, which simply received a top-end tune-up and rejetting of the carb. That statement-making stack that adorns the mixing bowl is an MCC one-off. Finally, of course, there’s that ultra-sharp flame job. Doug himself can be thanked for that.

There’s no denying that the brothers Morton and their team took this once-condemned bike and turned it into a beauty. But at what price comes such perfection?

How about $7,400 total.

Now that’s a sobering thought. Perhaps it’s time to crack yourself another cool one. RB