Dennis "D-Man" Vazquez makes it known that he's not a wealthy man. You would never guess this from looking at the custom sportbikes that he puts together in his North Bergen, New Jersey-based Pit Stop Motorsports shop (www.xtremeridersweb.com), though. Vazquez's stunning, high-concept customs blow minds and bring home trailer-loads of show trophies too, and if you didn't know better you'd guess that each bike has roughly an NFL quarterback's salary invested in its creation. Vazquez's dirty little secret is that the actual capital outlay for each of his projects is surprisingly low. Instead of spending bags and bags of cash, Vazquez spends hundreds of hours painstakingly fabricating one-off components (usually made from salvage parts that don't cost a cent) to make the Pit Stop creations look unlike any other bike on the street.
Vazquez's method of bike building is a direct contrast to the big bucks, bolt-on build-ups that many other so-called "artists" in the custom bike game tend toward. The sheer imagination displayed in Vazquez's bikes and the solid fabrication skills that bring them together have definitely earned him a solid reputation in the custom bike game. When the producers of the forthcoming "Metric Revolution" television program assembled the list of custom sportbike builders to invite to be a part of their inaugural custom sportbike build-off, Vazquez was one of the select few that earned a spot on the short list. When he got the invite to be a part of the program, Vazquez didn't hesitate before saying yes, and he certainly didn't let any lack of capital (especially compared to some of the other builders, many of whom have successful aftermarket businesses to underwrite their builds), give him pause.
"What I do is make bikes that look original and draw attention on the streets for their style-not for a ton of aftermarket shiny stuff bolted on," Vazquez, a former Wall Street trader, says. "I figured I didn't have the budget to invest in a lot of fancy parts, but I knew I could do something special with the 'Metric Revolution' bike that would really make people say 'wow.'"
"Wow" is right. Vazquez's "Metric Revolution" creation, which he dubbed "The Genesis," is jaw-dropping in every respect, from its custom bodywork to its hand-fabricated components to the insanely intricate graphics that cover nearly every surface of the machine, including the frame and engine. The level of detail on Vazquez's machine is stunning-you have to look at the bike four or five times to take it all in, and the closer you look, the more you see.
Part of the "Metric Revolution" build-off premise is that the builders don't get to choose the bike they work with-instead they start with a bike that was given to them by the "Metric Revolution" producers. Vazquez certainly lucked out in the bike-draw lottery, landing a 2005 Kawasaki ZX-10R, one of the hottest sportbikes on the street. But the stock bike is just a starting point for Vazquez, and he immediately got down to business changing up and changing out nearly every last component on the big Ninja to come up with a credible (and competitive) custom creation to show off in front of the TV cameras.
Lucky for Vazquez, this project was scheduled to kick off just after he'd finished relocating Pit Stop Motorsports from the tiny, 750-square-foot hovel that he started in to a new and much more spacious location with a shop more suitable for designing and building ground-up customs like The Genesis. Still, even with more room to work his magic, Vazquez knew that undertaking a project of this scale would be as big a challenge as any that he'd faced in the six years since he started building bikes. "I knew this would be hard competing against all the other big-money guys that are part of this competition," Vazquez says. "I don't dump a lot of money into my bikes. I'm the type of guy who'll just head out to the junk pile behind the shop and find some piece of scrap to make a custom part out of. But when I got the call to be a part of the show, I knew it would be the biggest commercial for my work, ever. I couldn't pass it up." The opportunity turned out to be one of the most fun projects in Pit Stop's history, Vazquez told us.
True to form, Vazquez and the Pit Stop crew didn't splash out tons of money on aftermarket parts for The Genesis. He instead focused on crafting parts from existing stock and making do with whatever items he could source from friends. A perfect example of Vazquez's junkyard engineering is the funky, double-braced swingarm fitted to The Genesis. The going price for a conventional extended swingarm with a fat tire would be around $4,500-an amount that Vazquez was unwilling to part with, and besides, he figured that most of the other builders would be going with the stretched-out look, and he wanted to do something to set his ride apart. So instead he took two salvage swingarms-one from a Yamaha R6 that he had in his shop and the second from a Yamaha R1 that was donated to him by fellow "Metric Revolution" competitors, McCoy Motorsports-and started cutting. The R6 was flipped upside down, cut up and welded to the top of the R1 piece to create a one-off and extra-beefy swingarm. Onto the ends of this Vazquez welded the gothic-looking accents that were hand made by R.I.S. Designs (the left one incorporating a license plate holder), and finished it off with an exaggerated hugger fender that looks like alien claws enveloping the rear tire. The wrap-around rear fender actually started as a "Gangster" fender from Baron Custom Accessories, originally made to cover the 18-inch rear wheel of a Yamaha cruiser. Pit Stop modified the fender to fit inside the R6/R1 combo swingarm and then cut away the center to create the talons. Riding just a fraction of an inch above the rear Avon tire, it's a fine example of the careful detail and craftsmanship that went into this machine.