Hot rods. Motorcycles. Whisky. Rock and roll. American Metal Customs builds, modifies, and services epic bikes and cars while celebrating the mystique that goes with them. American Metal owner Chris Bishop and lead builder and shop manager Josh Allison have teamed up to exemplify the best in American craftsmanship and, as their website promises, “build the raddest s#!% you have ever seen.”
“We love preserving the history of America in that hot rod culture and the motorcycle culture that created what we do now, especially as builders,” explains Allison.
The partnership between Bishop and Allison started, appropriately, with a bike, the “Captain America” Easy Rider replica motorcycle. When Allison was working at Orange County Choppers, “Chris would come in and look at the bike. We started talking and we just realized how much we had in common: the love for cars, the love for motorcycles… We had a lot of similar thoughts, so this bike really connected us.”
Before attaining fame for his daring motorcycles, Josh Allison trained at WyoTech. He took courses in Applied Shop Management and Collision and Refinishing. But it was the Street Rod and Advanced Street Rod classes that made the biggest impact: “It absolutely just blew my mind. It changed everything when I started to weld and I started to learn how to metal-shape…. I realized that the things in my head that I wanted to create, I could actually make into a reality.”
Now Allison is a social media star, a celebrity in the world of elite custom bikes. But he hasn’t forgotten what it took to get there. “This work is super important to me. It’s not only my livelihood, but it’s my passion and there’s been so much sacrifice in life to get to this point… the sacrifices my family, especially my wife, has made along the way.”
This Baileigh Biography video offers a tour of American Metal Customs’ state-of-the-art facilities, including the full interior custom shop and the custom paint area. Its storage facility includes a camera-monitored VIP section that provides access to the bootlegger lounge, a cocktail space behind a hidden passage.
