Our advice
About Save The Choppers!
For us, it has always been more than a slogan. It is an attitude, a commitment to chopper culture and a stand for individuality and old values. "Save the Choppers" is a matter of the heart and we are ready to breathe new life into our baby. We have a few concrete ideas in our luggage and a few more ideas in our heads. We don't know what will come of it, but we are keen to give the grown, great STC community a home again. Because what we do know is that riding off without a fixed destination can end up in the most beautiful places.
With this in mind, we invite you to join us on our trip. True to the motto: Preserve our Wild Life - Save the Choppers!
The story behind:
One of the initiators is chopper connoisseur Horst Heiler, who already promoted chopper culture in the 1980s through his "Special Bike Meetings" and the "Custom & Classic" indoor bike shows that he organised from 1991 onwards. Together with the trade magazine BIKERS-live!, further events followed in 1995 and 1996. Today he works as an author for CUSTOMBIKE, among others. Since 2004 Horst Heiler has been inviting people to the "Custom & Classic Fest", a small but fine event that attracts numerous friends and connoisseurs of the chopper scene every year. After all, choppers are a dominant part of the event. In 2008, he met chopper enthusiast Tom Rad in the USA, who in turn introduced him to his acquaintance Dave Bell.
This is where "Save The Choppers!" originated, because Dave Bell is a cartoonist and pinstriper. His creations include "Jock E. Shift", a chopper-riding comic figure. Years before, he had drawn a poster for Tom Rad, because at that time he built choppers according to the "old school": long fork, narrow front wheel. And this at a time when sinfully expensive custom bikes with ultra-wide tyres were threatening to displace the real choppers.
A slogan that Dave drew on Tom's poster was "Preserve our Wild Life - Save The Choppers!", which Tom Rad used as his motto from then on. It became his personal motto against the overkill and unaffordable custom bikes of the turn of the millennium.
Horst not only liked the slogan "Save The Choppers!", he saw it the same way as Dave and Tom. Fitting for a scene and a culture and all those who think and feel the same way. And so the slogan made the rounds, was used by customisers and mechanics, and from then on found itself on workshop walls all over the country.
Together with designer and graphic artist Ralf Burkart, Horst Heiler launched »Save The Choppers!« again in 2016. After a successful motorbike exhibition, a 500-page book that can be considered a standard work of the scene and a few nice T-shirts and hoodies, it became a little quieter around »Save the Choppers!«. Nevertheless, the community continues to grow, its motto is more topical than ever and the motto of entire generations who share the same passion. Save The Choppers! can be used non-commercially by anyone who shares the same attitude and who wants to preserve a living chopper culture with its unique spirit.
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