Thumbs up for Street Chopper

When I turned the GK website into a printed magazine in February 2007, the main motivation was frustration that I couldn't buy a magazine on the newsstands that featured the kind of bikes I liked or wanted to know more about.

I have always bought the UK magazine Classic Bike, and it's still my yardstick for quality old-bike-journalism, but when it came to choppers, the mainstream titles were sadly lacking.

So it was a pleasant surprise to recently flick through the past five or six issues of Street Chopper in one sitting and find a magazine that features my kind of bikes, with almost no duds or filler, decent photography, and proper grown-up writing. I met editor Jeff Holt in LA in June, and he's done a commendable job turning this title around. Grant Peterson writes a lot of the features... and they're good. It may be a little States-centric, but then it's a Californian title.

If Street Chopper had been around in its present guise when I was researching print costs nearly three years ago, I doubt if I'd have had the motivation to produce the first issue of GKM.