American Iron Magazine – August 2019

AIMag.comIssue #379 / American Iron / 43

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cut and weld in order to change something major (like the
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jig and then design and build an entire new backbone, neck
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was fabbed so that it would bolt into the existing Indian
aluminum center frame section. From there, Dave went to
work on the leaf-spring front end. The entire arrangement
was custom-fabricated at the Covington shop. With the
front end done, they moved to the back and lowered the rear
end by way of a Platinum Air Suspension setup. It works by
way of a stock Indian swingarm.
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shop has multiple CNC machines. Building custom parts

sounds easy, but each of the CNC machining centers is

working full time building components for custom parts

operation. As most of you know, to make a CNC-machined

part, a good amount of time is actually spent creating the

program. For this custom Indian, many components were

custom-machined on the CNC, but that meant hours to

create the various programs and then stopping one of the

production machines and setting it up for custom work. It all

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it took almost a full year to build this motorcycle, but the

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disrupting production too adversely.

Back to the bagger: Once the frame and front end were

nailed down, Covington fabricated a custom steel head-

light nacelle that for all intents and purposes, looks like an