Andy Carter and his Pangea Speed hand-crafted motorcycle components earned fans at ChopCult when he donated a license plate bracket to last month's Bryan Berky fundraiser. Fab skills and personal generosity of that nature are rare, and it's even more uncommon in someone so relatively young in the game. A visit to Andy's blog is all it takes to see this blue collar builder is moving his brand of inspired fab work in a clever direction.

Andy Carter

Company: Pangea Speed 

Age: 24 

Hometown: Bountiful, UT

Education: The majority of my education has been hard knocks, but these are a few of the schools I have attended: Jim Russell formula race car mechanics school, an apprenticeship with Ian Gordon racing fabrication, Utah State University and Salt Lake Community College

Experience: I have been fabricating professionally for around 5 years, and building cars, bikes and customizing everything under the sun for basically my entire life. My parents owned an industrial design and prototyping firm, so I grew up working at their shop

Past and present chopper-related clients: All my experience with choppers has been on personal builds, or playing with friends’ bikes and the occasional light fabrication project for a client, like building a sissy bar or a set of pipes

Business philosophy: To produce parts that are based on good design principals and that meet high quality standards. To design parts that perform as well as they look

In my own words: About 3 years ago I moved back to SLC after living in California for a few years. During my stay in California I graduated from formula racecar mechanics school, wrapped up a yearlong apprenticeship with Ian Gordon and worked in one of the nation’s top hot rod shops. Back in Salt Lake I continued building custom cars for a local shop. The car scene was getting kind of stale and I noticed I was focusing more of my spare time on bike. Motorcycles are so much less stress than cars; you can mess with a bike for a few hours after work and actually gain some ground. While working on my bike one night I came to the conclusion that I just wasn't digging most of the parts that were available on the market. Everything I found seemed like it was either low-quality construction, or it was really utilitarian and lacking a relevant style.

I decided I wanted to create a motorcycle parts company that built high quality parts with a defined style backing them up. For 20 years I’d hung around my parents’ shop, whose sole mission was to design stylish parts for a huge variety of industries. That experience gave me a good place to start.

 

How I make parts: First I hand sketch the part on paper. After considering as many different options as possible, we select a design that suits our needs from a functional and visual perspective. After we’re finished with the selection process our 3D modeler creates the part in Solidworks on a computer. With a digital 3D model we make an acrylic sample on a polyjet printer. With part in hand we can make sure everything looks and fits properly. Once we’re confident the part fits, we create tooling. After tooling, we make the final product

Pangea Speed on ChopCult