Russell Mitchell – Lean Mean Motorcycle Machiene

Q) What are the current television projects that you are working on?

A) Right now we’re shooting a second season of our “Build It or Bust” for the Speed Channel. We are also preparing to start shooting a build off type show for a European channel.

Q) Please tell us the premise for your show “Build It or Bust.”

A) It’s basically a situation where we take a guy off the streets. We bring in a guy who has basically said, “I’ve seen you build these choppers on TV. How hard could it be? I bet I could build one in a month.” I say, “Ok, here’s the tool chest, here’s a pile of parts and here’s a workshop. You’ve got a month. You build a bike that gets my approval and you just got yourself a free $50,000 custom motorcycle. If you fail, we throw you out on your rear, you get nothing and you’re a loser on national TV.

Q) Only bikes that get your seal of approval entitle the creators to keep their bike. What criteria are you looking for in a bike?

A) It has to be built to a high quality finish. I own a company that builds custom motorcycles and I’m very well known in the industry as a custom motorcycle builder. I have a very good reputation as such. Basically, every step of the way has to be up to standard. The welding has to be strong and attractive. The assembly has to be on properly. The bike has to be a custom show bike and it also has to be put together so it’s a safe vehicle. It has to be good enough that, theoretically, I would be proud of saying, “Ok, this came out of my shop.” It has to be good enough for me to say that it’s up to my high standard.

Q) What is it about motorcycles that impassion you?

A) That’s a tough one! I think sort of growing up as a kid and watching other guys out of my parents’ car windows it always looked to me like they were the cool guys. They were the tough guys with all of that freedom. They were the guys that were doing what they wanted and the rest of the world was trapped inside these steel boxes “working for the man” and doing the 9-5 grind. It always just represented to me a sense of freedom. There was sort of a strange romantic appeal about the whole bikers thing. It’s just sort of outside normality and outside of society. It’s the appeal of the unknown a bit.

Q) How did you originally get involved in working with motorcycles?

A) Well, back when I was 16 years old, (which is when in England you can get your first motorcycle license) I bought my first bike. I pretty much straight away started taking off parts, molding parts and messing around with it. I sold that a few months later and built another. Every bike that I got I got more and more into tinkering with it that within a year I was stripping the bikes down to the frame and rebuilding them completely from the ground up (cutting and grinding). Over the years, as I went through more and more bikes, I basically taught myself all the disciplines that exist within the world of motorcycle building. I learned to cut, grind, weld and machine and, obviously, I taught myself mechanics and what makes a motorcycle work. I got familiar with whatever it takes to build a motorcycle from the ground up. Once I was over here in the states, about ten years ago, I built a bike for a good friend of mine and myself (we both built two bikes) and they got a lot of magazine coverage. I had designed a lot of custom parts for them and a lot of people started asking where they could get those parts. I thought, I’m a struggling actor over here and I’ll start a part time deal making some motorcycle parts for a little bit of extra cash. Part time rapidly became full time and now we’re a multimillion-dollar corporation that just moved into some nice big premises and we’re doing quite a serious company in our old age.

Q) You have described yourself and your company Exile Cycles as “the bastard child of the motorcycle industry.” Why is that?

A) Our motorcycles are rather different than the custom motorcycles that America is used to. Our bikes are very industrial flavored. They are usually black with a lot of brushed metal surfaces. They are very clean and simple, minimal machines. They look very tarred down to the basics; the less is more of motorcycle world. I like to think that it if a five-year kid drew a motorcycle he’d draw one of our motorcycles. The important essential components: the motor, the wheel and the pipes are all sort of exaggerated and beefy and tough. The turn signal, the mirrors and all the other stuff that sort of clutters up the big picture they’ve all been made to disappear. That sets it apart from the mainstream sort of American customs, which tend to have super gold paint jobs and excessive qualities of chrome. Those are generally all about the decoration and not about the lines, the shape and the validity of the machine.

Q) How do you feel having fans like George Clooney, Chris Cornell and John Mellancamp?

A) It’s great! My style was (way back when) sort of underground and not very popular way back when I first started. So, it’s great after all of these years of standing on my soapbox and saying, “Hey, this is how a motorcycle should look,” that I am finally being heard. To have such a compliment as having guys like that calling me up and ordering motorcycles from me is real good. It’s great and the whole TV coverage has helped a lot to get our face out in front of the American public that I think more and more now people are warming up to our style and our taste is becoming more accepted by the people in general.

Q) What do you do in your spare time?

A) I don’t really have a lot of spare time. My typical week consists of filming the TV show Monday through Friday from like 8:30am to about lunch time and then I run over to Exile Cycles and make sure that everything is running smoothly there for a few hours. Then, I pick up my six-year-old boy from school at 5pm. I get him home, get some homework done and then get him put to bed. I manage about half an hour of exercise myself and I’m up at 6am to do a little bit more of a workout to get the blood flowing. I give him his breakfast and get him off to school and then do it all again! Most Fridays, I am on an airplane somewhere in the states to make a bike show appearance somewhere. We have a big 40-foot trailer that hauls our bikes around the country and most weekends we will be making a guest appearance at one of the many bike shows that occur around the country. On Sunday night I get back exhausted and hung over and Monday morning I do it all again!

Q) What would you like to say to your fans and supporters?

A) Basically, I’d like to give a huge thank you! I’m extremely thankful to all of our customers and America and to everyone that has come together to give me this opportunity to actually not only make a living doing what I love, but to make a great living and to have such a fun life. To have all of the bike shows, to do stuff on TV…I really enjoy those sorts of things. It’s phenomenal and it blows me away that we’ve been able to get this far and I’m extremely grateful to everyone and everything that has made it happen.