Run to Raton          2025

Motorcycle Mike began riding dirt bikes around eight years old. By the age of sixteen Mike had mastered riding the long fork choppers from the late 1960's. After dabbling with old Triumphs, he moved up to his first sportster in 1988 and immediately fell in love with the old shovelheads by eighteen. Mike could never bring himself to buy someone else's Harley so building bikes out of junk parts took hold of him at a very early age.  Now at age 53, Mike finds himself with forty years of experience working on old difficult Harleys from the 1940's and up.  Mike also spent several years with the Kentucky Motorcycle Association fighting against helmet laws and other legislation related to motorcycling in his home state of Kentucky. Around 1997, Mike figured out he could make a living working on Harleys and enrolled in the American Motorcycle Institute in Daytona Beach, Florida. Upon graduating, Mike returned to Kentucky and worked for Stogie & Big Joes Motorcycle Shop in Newport, Kentucky. That summer, Mike would be critically injured in a motorcycle accident that put him in a wheelchair for six months. While in that wheelchair, Mike rebuilt his 1966 Generator Shovelhead that had been destroyed. Mike would recover and go on to work at Cinn City Choppers and eventually Harley Davidson of Cincinnati. The events of September 11, 2001, would bring Mike's career at HD to an end and Mike would go on to open his first custom shop called Gangster Cycles.  Eventually Mike would split from his business partners and form Motorcycle Mike's M/C repair shop in Glencoe, Kentucky around 2004. Mike closed the shop in 2008 to help his father in his Babbit bearing repair shop, Cincinnati Babbit Inc. Around 2017, Mike ended up in New Mexico for the first Run to Raton and decided to pull up roots and head to New Mexico to try his hand at early retirement.  Retirement didn't stick very well so Mike opened his latest shop, Motorcycle Mike's Vintage Motorcycle Repair. And as they say, the rest is history.