Christmas is cancelled.

it's been a while since i sold shirts or products. i've been busy moving, and they're not enough hours in a day...... and everyone sells a chopper shirt now. round logos are the rage don't forget to put your city on it. but the truth is... i got a cool thing coming, it's would have been perfect for the holiday season, but it just didn't all line up in time. mid january i hope to have it all done. so thanks for the inquiries and support. no disrespect, i just had bigger fish to fry. stay healthy, love those that need it, go for a ride, take deep breath of cool early morning air and bark at the moon. be well, max

medium format 6x7 by my friend Sam.

these will become precious memories and help my brain remember these times.

thanks SAM

click on photos

found these photos from what i think would be 5 years ago. from a day trip to the delta.

*99.69% positive i posted these before. oh vellll.


ken nagahara un leashing the power of the egg. all smiles.

the 69 when it was still tangled up in blue

toby treating her like a lady, lay down and grind on em.
i don't refer to bikes as her, because i think it sounds corny.
 but i just did.

toby has a pretty good lil John "whaaaaat!"
and i think that's what is happening here

not thinking about t.v. or food.

lets talk about this feeling........

alley oop indy in the corner.

sun's going down, you're with people

you respect and admire, everyones just

trying to get in one more..... fuck it, like

most pure things it's actually pretty indescribable.

Deaf Women, Meat Hook Sissy Bars, Melted White Shoes, Forgotten Women, and Life goes on.

Story and photos from Carey about his Dad.


 Carey... thanks man. I Love this kind of stuff. Not just a random
cool photo, but the history behind them. thanks for taking the time.  -max-


email #1

Hey Max. Just listened to your radio show and got a good smile out of the stories of growing up and the simple things in life.  I thought id share my dads bike with you since I thought you would appreciate the weirdness of it being a swing arm hermaphrodite. My dad Shannon bought the 63 flh in the late 70s for 2400 bucks and turned it into the flying pan. He's told me a story of throwing a woman off the back at 40 mph in the late 70s  since her white shoes were burning on the pipes.  Fast forward twenty some years and all I knew growing up was that his bike was the best in the world since it had trophies and he told me it was the best. A few years back I was turned on to your blog and got really excited about the way your bikes looked and it got me really excited to fall back in love with bikes all over again. Anyways just wanted to share some old photos of my dad back when and a few from these days of it sitting in his garage untouched and thank you for being so passionate and building beautiful machines.

email#2
You are more than welcome to post it on the blog. A little more info. He had browns gold plating gold plate the engine in 14k gold in 1981 and said his best years of being in a relationship were dating a woman who was deaf and he'd go out in the garage and rev it as loud as possible. The sissy bar is a meat hook taken out of a butcher shop. The bike has been up to 150 mph down Stark street in Portland, OR. The story of the woman as told earlier was my father picked a woman up at the bar. He's a firm believer that a woman doesn't belong on a Harley so he has no pegs and the meat hook sissy bar was to hook them in the gut. This woman insisted she go for a ride. Her white shoes started to melt on the pipes so he threw her off the back at 40mph and said he never looked back or saw her again.

can you hear that laugh? i can. my buddy brian "garcia" takes some bitchin photos.

this one is from when we rode out to the EFMC 50th party. in search of nothing but a good time, an open mind, and to pay respect to the dude that is constantly blowing minds. Tom Fugal.

capturing Ken 2010

this was the first day of our california to new york round trip. the future was unwritten, northern cal. motoring through this beautiful land, eager, with steady diet of exhaust fumes and gas station food. i lost my hat this day and my cut off shorts in case we went swimming.... turned out i didn't need em.

i knew there was a reason i liked this guy.

doesn't have a chopper, isn't getting into lowriders, never had skinny jeans.

a dozen years dumber....

12 years ago i would drive by this ghetto loading dock everyday and think about things to launch off of it... usually space out thinking about trying to get a car on two wheels A-TEAM style.. but without a disposable vehicle to practice with my next idea was to ride a motorcycle past it and have someone jump(ollie) over me. i ran it by a few people who's response was kind of like a "well right on" followed up by a subject changer. so i approached Mark Gonzales with the idea, simply because mark is fearless, made out of rubber, and i knew if all else failed i could call him a "pussy" or say "yea you probably couldn't do it anyway" which would send him into a tailspin and for sure wouldand have to prove me wrong. we ended up trying it out and gabe morford shot photos of it, but then they wanted dan wolfe to film it, so we tried it again... stupid ideas turned into fun, which is good enough for me. so 12 years later real skateboards wanted to re shoot it with some of their new pros, Ishod and Jake, these guys are so talented that i knew something insane would go down. Two things, i hadn't fired up the bike in a decade, and Ishod had never ridden a motorcycle. Turns out the bike fired up with a little fine tuning, and the same could be said for Ishod. Thanks to Real for being such a phenomenal inspiration over the years and taking on hair brain ideas like this one.
 max schaaf 2013
 sorry if there is a commercial before the video, it's just the way the world works these days


 

steinbeck passage

john steinbeck, the man can put words down like no other, this is not breaking news, but damn sometimes it just floors me. to be able to write with such seamless clarity, like he's sitting next to you, telling you about it. not over polished just clear and perfect...... doing a quick re-read of travels with Charley, it's been at least a decade, so as i grow older this passage hold more weight. check it out:

-- CHOPPER PROPHETS --

NOT BOBBER PROFITS...

It's a radio interview show with interviews of people
in this chopper community..

mike and i talked the other week and he let me
ramble on and on and on and on.

check it out here:
chopper prophets

ken nagahara a few months back shooting the purgatory bike for roller. tangled up in blue.

old adam wright photo "peeling out"

rubbers burning

this book is great. takes place mostly in N. California, detective story. simple relatable tale.

a story i wrote about working as a shipper at the first DLX

i worked as a shipper at the first dlx, small place unit #4 i think. everything was just starting.. real, spitfire, thunder... they had been around but jeff was really starting to give it a push. my boss, the shipping manager was a guy named sperry, it was just me and him. He wanted to be Rollins and so did Jim at the time. Both of them had the Rollins mantra of being a writer, being  physically fit, black clothes, and the blackest coffee. Sperry had inquired about my  coffee consumption... i had told him i dabbled in the area of coffee. He immediately  runs off and brews up some coffee that had the consistency of roofing tar. He pulls down  a mug and hands me a hot cup of his brew. I figured I'd just kind of sip at for the next bit, we went back to shipping and he's got his Rollins band playing and were loading up boxes, i take a few more pulls on the coffee and then suddenly i start to sweat, my heads spins a bit,  and i feel so weird. Faking my way at normalcy for about 5 minutes until my stomach lets out a grumble that gives the 1989 earthquake a run for its money. DLX was very small then, just a couple of rooms and the bathroom was pretty much dead center. Discretion was not much of a possibility when it came to bathroom blow outs... as was the case in this particular moment when 3/4 of the staff saw the new shipper (me) hot footing down the hallway with my eyes locked on the bathroom door. The toilet and i went to Vietnam together and the silence after the battle was one in which you could hear a cotton ball drop on the ground. Maybe no one noticed???..... This soldier exited the employee bathroom with a cold sweat and a red face to the welcoming  applause and cheers of my new co-workers. I wanted to crawl inside one of the board boxes, I'm a sensitive creature and at 18 in a new environment the sensitivity was peaking. I was pretty sure at the time someone was already on the phone to Thrasher feeding them the story of the  new DLX shipper that just exploded their facilities for the latest Trash column. I returned to the shipping room and Sperry was packing a box totally unaware of my last ten minutes, looking over his shoulder and shouting "good stuff huh!" in reference to the coffee.

 *warning the photo below has nothing to do with this story, please make no correlation between the above story and the below photo

sounds good, smells trippy

found this old one from thrasher 1992

I was stoked to share the pages with JJ Rogers. Thrasher painted an old filing cabinet and dragged it to a bunch of different spots. They brought it to the widow maker and put it over the channel, i thought tailgrab nose bonk.

paulo's paint

painted this for my buddy Paulo form joe king helmets in Brazil. A good friend and solid dude.

somedays just being alive is good enough, recognizing the balance between the delicateness of life and the will to survive

they'll try and pull you down, break what is yours, scrape at what you've built. little hands, small hearts, small fish in this big pond called the human race.

= brooklyn invitational = 2013

 always a good time out in brooklyn for the invitational

thanks john, keino, and jeffro and everyone involved.

the show is always a little romantic to me.....from the time ken and chris and I rode there and
back in 2010. round trip. 7000 miles. fuckin-a, seems like forever ago.

sebastian complaining about being so handsome and cool. we can talk for hours.

wild in the streets!  photo by mild in the streets.

t. bang... the original tony bang is actually pushing backwards in this photo.

casual encounters of the 3rd kind. man-boy-wolf. awesome dude.

  cool bikes, cool shit and hot shit.

 what the fuck you say bout my bike? see you next year

baby got back

good parts.. not shit parts. fair enough. brian rules.

a slice of the grim raper

barbizon modeling shoot. "better luck next time"

made a little video. last day of eastern span of bay bridge.

"THE UGLY SIDE" from max schaaf on Vimeo.

summertime 2013

i love this time of year
 they bay is beautiful
 the clouds are a thousand different paintings
 cool nights and warm days
 friends passing through
 getting it while you still can