Sands ended his pro racing career in '02, after serious injuries (including a broken back) and a lack of motivation caused him to lose interest. "I just got over my performance on a motorcycle being the only thing that determined how happy I was," he says. "I didn't want to be controlled anymore by how fast I went on a motorcycle." At the same time, he was also getting started as a custom bike builder and beginning to channel all the energy that drove him on the racetrack into building and fabricating one-off custom motorcycles. In fact, Sands finished up his first frame-up custom, the well-known "Whiskey Tango," just days before his final race in '02. On the surface, this path hardly makes sense. No two bikes are less alike than a 250GP racer (with a tiny, taut chassis and high-revving two-stroke motor) and a custom chopper (with a massive, slow-revving V-twin engine and stretched-out stance), but the lack of similarity was part of the attraction, Sands says. Building customs, it turned out, was the perfect cure for his race-instigated burnout.
Sands wasn't always a chopper fan. "I was such a purist-I mean, I raced 250GP bikes, nothing is a more pure race bike than that. And I remember thinking, F*ck choppers...f*ck anything that didn't perform," Sands says. But working full-time at Performance Machine, Sands couldn't avoid choppers-especially since he was working side-by-side with West Coast Choppers' Jesse James, who was also a Performance Machine employee when he started making bikes. Building race bikes had given Sands formidable mechanical and fabrication skills, and building custom bikes was a logical outlet for those talents. But even from the beginning, it was clear that Sands wouldn't be building typical custom bikes. Even his earliest bikes like Whiskey Tango, though they were clearly choppers in spirit, showed obvious sportbike cues like inverted forks and oversized, race-inspired front brakes.
In the intervening years, Sand's own bikes have evolved to represent a style that is utterly original. Looking at the four bikes featured in this article, you'll find them nearly impossible to categorize. The massive V-Twin engines and smooth, flowing bodywork scream chopper, but the sportbike suspensions, wheels, tires and aggressive, streetfighter-ish stance and styling connect immediately with the sportbike world. Ask Sands about bikes that have blown his mind recently and the list, as you might expect, is exceptionally diverse: "The Yamaha MT-OS [a naked streetfighter-styled concept bike] is gnarly. [Chopper builder] Roger Goldammer's bikes are insane. And of course, any MotoGP race bike, especially the Ducatis." Clearly, Sands' mind operates in many motorcycle modes, and, like all great art, his creations are just a pure expression of what Sands sees in his mind.
His bikes are just a natural progression of the custom bike evolution, Sands says. "Choppers-everyone's got them now, so let's go to something different," he says. "What drives me is creating what I see in my head. It's just a product of where I've been and where I come from. It doesn't have anything to do with anyone else-it only has to do with my experience in life and with bikes." And while many chopper builders remain conservative and afraid to branch out into other types of bikes for fear of alienating their core customers, Sands has no doubt that the custom bike world is ready for something different. "I see a lot of guys, particularly sportbike crossover guys (and every day there's more and more of those), who are really into my bikes," he says.