What is a chopper motorcycle?

The chopper takes its name from chopping a standard motorcycle down to only what its builder wanted to keep, then rebuilding the rest around a new, more dramatic geometry. The front forks are extended and angled further out than standard, stretching the wheelbase and pushing the front wheel well ahead of the rider. The frame is often reshaped to match, the seat dropped low, and a tall sissy bar sometimes added behind it. Unlike a bobber, which trims a stock frame, a chopper usually alters the frame's actual geometry, which is why the two styles look so different despite both starting from a stripped-down idea. The style grew out of American custom garages, and one machine carried it worldwide: Captain America, the bike Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider in 1969. Fonda designed it and, as the National Motorcycle Museum records, commissioned it from the builders Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy, on a panhead motor in a rigid frame with the forks extended out front. It stays about as personal as motorcycling gets: most choppers are one-offs, so a definition can only ever describe the family resemblance. What we will not do is give you numbers for rake and trail, because we could not source a definition of them we would stand behind. The types of motorcycle page says more about who decides these names, which is nobody in particular.

Our chopper art page draws your own build in ink, blueprint or oil-painting style from a single photo. Its stripped-down ancestor, the bobber, is worth reading too.

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Written by Craig Fearn, Throttlefolio. Last updated 9 September 2026.