how not to chop a bike

This is Suicide's 500 Triumph chop as it was when he first bought it. This is the "before" picture. You can see in the pic that the oil tank is mounted to the front of the frame and the battery is nowhere to be seen. The battery was in the saddlebag. The coil was mounted right next to the carburateor, (yes that's a bad thing), and the front end was completely non-functional. The fork angle was achieved by using "raked" triple trees that were resulted in negative trail, as opposed to raking the steering head. This sort of steering geometry made the bike unstable and dangerous. The fork's angle made the fork tubes flex, instead of the fork compressing. The tubes were permanently bent. The bike has since been made roadworthy by Rick and Randy from Gypsy Cycle.

Here is the "after" pic. Still radical, but rideable. The bent fork tubes and retarded triple trees were ditched in favor of a single-spring girder front end. The oil-tank was mounted under the seat where it belongs, and the battery was mounted in the battery tray provided by the oil tank. A Harley coil was mounted just behind the steering head. The Schwinn (we think) apes were kept at the owner's request. Not every part was the ideal choice, but it works now and it's rideable. Whatever useable parts that were already lying around at the time were used.