Gravedigger on the roll

Tim MacKinnon could probably incorporate even that if challenged. The Parade Street resident started customizing bicycles with bizarre items three years ago when he made one for his son, Darrell, who was 12 at the time. Since then he’s shown them around the province and won several awards at the Wharf Rat Rally.

He attributes the birth and popularity of these unusual bikes to California where they’re known as California Cruisers. “You can’t have motors on bikes on the boardwalk so they started customizing chopper bikes and tall bikes to go up and down the boardwalk,” he said.

He’s built close to half a dozen bikes to date, including several eight-foot tall bikes, made from one bike welded on top of another. “Where the seat used to be, that’s where the pedals are,” said Mackinnon. “You get onto the bikes like you get onto a horse. If you lean the bike right a little bit as you’re getting up the bike straightens up and off you go,” he said.

The perch allows for a better view over cars and vice versa. “When people see me coming, they actually stop,” laughed MacKinnon.

He has entered his creations in several parades and plans on having them in the Yarmouth Christmas parade on Nov. 22. “I have to locate some people to ride them. It’s hard to find people who want to ride these things,” he said.

It took 10 months for him to build a 12-foot long unit that he calls the Grave Digger, influenced possibly from his job as a gravedigger for the Yarmouth Mountain Cemetery.

The handlebars are grass clippers, the seat a shovel mounted on a pick that’s been heated and bent. The front forks are from a hospital bed rail and springs from a lawn tractor make the front wheel go up and down.

The bike has a blue glass skull, strobe light, taillights from a 1950 bus, and a trailer (made from parts of a real coffin) which features a pop cooler, DVD player, iPod, playstation, chair, cup holder and table. “When the town has it’s annual clean up I go around and pick up bicycles and bring them home and make something from them,” explains MacKinnon. “If I don’t have it, we’ll make it.”

Some of the welding work is completed at a friend’s place on his mig welder.

The Undertaker bike is nine and a half feet long and took a month to build. The front forks are made from a chain which has had each link welded. A modernized oil lamp (now battery powered) lights the way, and tire irons are back fender supports.

Other bikes feature square tubing from a weight lifting set, fireplace poker handles, curtain rods, flashlights, components from a fire sprinkling system, a cigarette lighter drilled into a tail light, an old motor shell, a back fender made from a sliced wringer washer, and cookie jar cutter/closet light.

He put the biggest four-wheel tire he could find on one bicycle.

Sometimes he has to go to great lengths to get things functional. “I had to make adjustments to a gearbox, chain and pedals on one. The gearbox is from a table saw; the back rim took about nine hours to make. It was five lawn tractor rims, a sprocket from a little girl’s bicycle, a four-wheeler tire and a four-foot inner tube to pump the back tire up,” he said.

MacKinnon tests his unusual contraptions in a parking lot before he paints them and says he just likes having them around afterwards. “Some guy stopped and offered me $2,000 for one, but it was only half done. I don’t know that I’d ever sell it,” he said.

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