Kissimmee resident David Heeter won Best in Show, the biggest award for custom bike building in the Southeast, at the Southeast Builders’ Championships for professional builders at the Orange County Choppers Roadhouse and Museum in Clearwater, Florida in April.
The custom built 1968 Triumph chopper was chosen over 40 to 50 other professionally built motorcycles.
When presented the award, Heeter said Orange County Choppers owner and TV personality Paul Tuttle, Sr. said to him, “I can tell you’ve been doing this a long time,” and Heeter replied, “Yeah, I’m 82 and I’ve been doing it longer than you.”
“Tuttle laughed and said, ‘Keep on doing it, brother,” Heeter said. “It was quite an honor for him to pick my bike out of all the six figure bikes there because I have six or seven grand in my bike. But he said as soon as he saw it he could tell it was Best in Show.”
At first, Heeter said he wasn’t so sure the show had gone well for him.
“When my class came up, I didn’t win anything, and I was a little disappointed. And then when the Best in Show award came up, my bike was on the big screen. My wife looked up and she goes, ‘Oh my God’ and the crowd was going crazy.”
The customized 1968 Triumph took Heeter about a year and a half to build, given that even at 82 he still works part time as a carpenter. But he still puts in eight to 10 hours a day on his motorcycles in his garage workshop.
“I’m usually out here until 8 o’clock at night,” he says, gestured around his Kissimmee workshop filled with tools, milling machines, welders, grinders and other tools of the trade, all obviously both wellkept and well used.
Heeter proudly shows the workmanship that went into his prize-winning bike.
“This one here I did everything, the frame, the handlebars, the front end, the sissy bar, the chain guard, everything is all fabricated inhouse right here,” Heeter said, pointing at the mural painted on the gas tank. “My son is a professional scenic artist out at Universal Studios. He said, ‘Dad, I don’t like bikes and you know that, but could I paint this one?’ So this is the first bike he ever attempted to paint. Everything is original. I did the wheels myself and put the twisted spokes in which you never see. The rigid frame, I painted that myself. Theres not a sign of a weld on it, it’s completely molded in. The seat is really, really unusual because I have little shock absorbers under it.”
Heeter first started customizing bikes around 1970, when he owned professional custom shops in in Pennsylvania, then later in St. Petersburg. But within a few years he closed up shop, went to work as a professional marine welder, married and started his family. In 1986 he moved to Kissimmee, building his own house in Buena Ventura Lakes—“Before BVL was even in existence”—and going to work as a union carpenter. He still teaches classes in construction at the union hall. Over the years he’s worked on projects in Universal, Epcot and other Disney parks, and many other projects.
He still has the first bike he built in retirement, a 1968 Harley Sportster, which is his own personal bike to ride. Since retiring he estimates he’s built about 18 bikes. He usually has a couple of projects going on at any time, starting new ones only after he sells a completed one, reinvesting the money he makes into the new project. He’s already working on his next project, another Harley Sportster, which he plans on building into his first “rat” bike, a style that is meant to look like a hastily assembled spare parts bike that is really a smoothrunning machine.
At 82, Heeter shows absolutely no signs of slowing down.
“When I retired 20 years ago, I started building bikes again,” Heeter says. “It was my passion.”
