American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 189 April 2015 | Page 6

LC Fabrications expands premises after raffling ‘Old Black’ LC FABRICATIONS was founded by Jeremy Cupp in 2006 on an empty table at the back of his family’s machine shop. He worked there after hours driven by his passion for custom motorcycles. Today, LC Fabrications is an established custom shop and Jeremy has two top ten places in the AMD World Championship of Custom Bike Building to his name, yet despite this success he still works 40-hour weeks in the family machine shop, while the revenue from his custom builds is reinvested into LC Fabrications. By 2007 Jeremy had made the move from the table at the back of the shop to a shed. After placing 6th in the 2009 AMD World Championship with TT Deluxe, Jeremy made the decision to separate his business from the family business, and in 2010 he signed the lease on his first shop. He says of that move: “It was a pretty ragged building in our town that was being used as a karate studio/barber shop. I grabbed together enough wiring to get me up and running, bought a mill and lathe, and made the jump. “The next two years were very difficult. The space was minimal, the structure in poor repair. I felt that I could not produce a good enough product with what I had to work with.” Jeremy looked at other options and discovered a larger building nearby on the market. After many hours of discussion with his local bank manager Jeremy had an agreement in place that would allow him to put an offer on the building. However, in order to secure ‘Old Black’ 6 AMERICAN MOTORCYCLE DEALER - APRIL 2015 the loan to buy the premises, the bank needed a 25 percent deposit. To fund the purchase, Jeremy decided to sell ‘Old Black’, the bike that finished 2nd in the Freestyle class at the 2012 AMD World Championship. “Jon Krouse of Monstercraftsman has been a dealer of mine for several years and we are good friends,” says Jeremy, “I was telling him the story, knowing he has the ability to pull rabbits from a hat, when he came up with the most ridiculous idea I had ever heard of. He wanted to raffle the bike online, 300 tickets at $100 each…that would never work, right?” Jeremy might have dismissed the idea, but Krouse ran with it and built a website and set up merchant services. The tickets began to sell as word spread and the story broke on the Internet. Lowside, Biltwell, Lowbrow, Burly and Monstercraftsman added additional merchandise to the raffle to help Jeremy out. The success of winoldblack.com was enough for Jeremy to secure the loan he needed and the real estate deal went through! The property was originally built in 1947 as the Grottoes Theatre, it was then purchased by the local fire department, serving as a community center and gear storage area for 50 years. When Jeremy got the keys there was much work to be done. He had to pour new cement floors, upgrade the wiring, heating and air, and get rid of 50 years of dirt and junk. Talking about how LC Fabrications stands today, Jeremy says: “Currently the ‘shop’ area of the building is finished and I am back to work… coincidentally building a bike for the next AMD World Championship. Other areas are still under construction, or in their original state, but for now I am going to just work hard so I can pay for the repairs.” LC FABRICATIONS Mt Crawford, Virginia, USA Tel: [phone] [email protected] www.lcfabrications.com