He was paying nothing for tuition on a full-ride football scholarship, living rent-free in the house his parents bought, and had already put in three years toward his goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon.
Then Derek Spitsnogle told his parents what he really wanted to do when he grew up.
Build hot rods.
And they cut him off.
“When I told them I was quitting college, quitting football, they said, 'You're on your own.' They said I'd be making the biggest mistake of my life.â€
He's not exaggerating. His mother remembers how they couldn't understand what their son was doing, and why.
“He had it made,†Marilee Spitsnogle said. “And then he said he was quitting college.â€
She looks up from the computer in his office, where she's been helping with the books. She thinks about the years since then.
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“But I'm glad he did, because he's followed his dream. He probably wouldn't be here now, and he probably wouldn't be happy.â€
He's here, yes. He's been spending 12 to 14 hours a day at his shop, Xotic Customs, on the southwest edge of Lincoln. But happy? Not quite, not yet, at least not late last week.
Spitsnogle and his crew were running out of clock, trying to customize a Harley in time to haul it to the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. He's scheduled to present it to its owner, a biker named Goat -- the emcee at the Full Throttle Saloon, a 30-acre bar big enough, and notorious enough, to have its own TV show.
But a few days before he wants to leave, the bike is in pieces. The frame is in one corner of the shop, the fork in the other. The motor is on a stand, the wheels are leaning against the wall and the handmade fenders and saddlebags are still waiting for sanding and polishing.
This bike better be running and rolling on Aug. 3. That night, just before Bret Michaels performs, Spitsnogle will get 30 minutes on stage with Goat. The Norris grad will unveil the big-wheel bagger he built to a crowd of more than 5,000 bikers -- all potential customers.
“Getting on stage doesn't make me nervous,†Spitsnogle said, a weekend of work ahead of him. “Getting the bike done makes me nervous.â€
THE BEGINNING
He'd grown up riding dirt bikes around Firth, and he'd just helped his roommate replace a shock absorber. So he felt qualified.
“I've always liked fast, fun stuff,†the 34-year-old said.
But he wasn't going to find that as a pre-med major and offensive tackle at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, so he enrolled at WyoTech auto school, where he amassed $50,000 in loans and was named salutatorian in street rod fabrication and upholstery.
Spitsnogle worked and learned for a few years at Covingtons, a custom shop in Oklahoma, before he decided to come home in 2004.
He opened his business in a room at the old lumberyard in Firth and later moved here, to West South and Folsom. They'll fix up and trick out cars and boats, but they specialize in making one-of-a-kind bikes.
He’d also developed an air-ride system for Harleys -- so riders can remotely raise or lower their bikes’ rear ends -- and started selling them at Sturgis three years ago.
That's how he got to know Gregg Cook, the biker better known as Goat.
Last year, the voice of Full Throttle asked Spitsnogle and his crew to customize his bike, and to have it ready by this year's rally.
“The guy fascinated me with so much knowledge of what he was doing, and his kindness,†Goat said. “And we just hit it off. He’s a straight-up dude.â€
Goat gave the builder few requirements, Spitsnogle said. Only that he wanted a big-wheel bagger.
Big wheel: Most standard Harley front wheels measure 16 inches in diameter. For Goat's bike, Spitsnogle would build a 30-inch spoked wheel.
Bagger: Aluminum saddlebags draped over the rear wheel.
Spitsnogle saw the chance for national exposure: He has a small shop in Nebraska. Goat is a big name in the biker world.
It’s worth the $35,000 to $40,000 he’ll put into this build before it’s finished.
“Goat's going to go before the entire biker nation,†he said. “And I want my style to stand out there.â€
THE BUILD
His style is often inspired by older American cars. One of his first big builds, for example, was a chopper for his father, reminiscent of Gary Spitsnogle's 1971 Dodge Charger R/T.
“We try to give off the old hot-rod vibe,†he said.
For Goat's bike, he started by taking his crew on a field trip to a junkyard. They weren't searching for anything specific; instead, they wanted to see which pieces and parts spoke to them.
They returned to Lincoln with a taillight from a 1962 Olds, a speaker from a '65 Impala, chrome from a '59 Dodge -- all of which he would embed in the bike's design.
“All of this little trinket stuff adds up and gives the bike character when it's done,†he said. “It's the little detail stuff that catches people's eye and makes them stand there for 20 minutes.â€
Goat dropped the bike off in April, but the 2008 Harley Street Glide sat in a corner until the first week of July; Xotic's crew was too busy with other jobs, Spitsnogle said.
But he was customizing in his head, sometimes lying in bed for hours thinking about what he wanted to do with the bike. “I get like an overall blurry picture. A silhouette of what I want.â€
He started with sheets of aluminum, shaping them with a power hammer and English wheel until he was happy with the first saddlebag.
Then he had to try to replicate that for the other bag. The result? They're not necessarily identical, not completely symmetrical, but he's OK with that. That shows they weren’t stamped out of a press or pulled from a mold.
“That's the whole point of a custom bike. To be unique.â€
He carried the design through the rest of the bike, extending the fender, reshaping the tank, choosing a candy green and gold flake paint scheme.
And Friday, all they had left to do was put it together, and finish the upholstery, and rewire the bike, and mount the motor, and get it going, and get it all polished and pinstriped.
They hoped to head north Monday.
“I’ve never had a deadline so bad.â€
THE DEADLINE
It looked like a nearly finished bike Monday morning. But it didn’t sound like one. It didn’t sound like anything, because they couldn’t get it started.
They’d had it running Sunday night but then the fuel pump quit. They fixed that but then couldn’t get a spark.
Wouldn’t be good if they tried starting it on stage and nothing happened, Spitsnogle said.
So he and a few others gathered around it, checking each wire, inspecting the coil, turning the bike over and over. Spitsnogle pulled out his phone and called the Harley dealership, ordering electrical parts.
“We’ve got a full day’s work ahead of us,†he said.
Earlier, as he described the design and pointed out the details, he said he wouldn’t have done anything different with this bike.
“Except I would have started earlier.â€