Nelson

It's a pretty small world. Four or so years back a former friend and I were heading to a swap meet and he said "hey, we gotta' pick this other dude up." OK. We grabbed the guy, headed off to the swap meet, and moved on. Little did I realize that the guy we picked up would fast become one of my closest, if not my closest friend. That dude was Josh Higgins.

So I'm into Harleys at the time along with cars. I try to pull Josh over to the dark side of cycles due to not having anyone with an old bike to ride with and I offer up a rough Indian Sport Scout to him for free, but he won't budge. He's a Hot Rod guy. In fact, in the world of period-perfect Hot Rods he's fast becoming one of THEE Hot Rod guys. Just don't tell him I said that.

At-any-rate, we'd banter endlessly over how cars were cooler than bikes or vice-versa from my end, and somewhere along the way Josh mentioned that his roommate in Hawaii, as well as in LA was into choppers. Neat. Long story short, his roommate for years was Nelson Kanno.

Nelson has shot and written for magazines for a long time now and has something like 200 or so articles under his belt. I've gotten to know him a little over the past couple of years; spent some time talking with him on the phone and such, and he's shared quite a bit of valuable info. about how not to get smoked in the magazine game with me. Real cool guy, a hard worker, and does what most just talk about.

So, while Josh and Nelson were living in Hawaii, Nelson built the bike below. At the time, the Japanese had just hit the underground Harley thing full-bore, so being half Japanese, Nelson saw an opportunity and sold the chopper to someone over there for more than he'd have ever gotten here in the US.



He then took the cash from the sale of his Shovel and proceeded to build this clean, 50's style Knucklehead.



Good dude with good taste. Aloha.