By, Jesse Kiser
What determines a man’s worth? Can you merely look at someone and know? Or does it require a little talking? What about education or life experiences? I might not know how you can determine his worth, but I do know how you should not: his occupation.
Robert Harbison was hesitant to tell me what he does to pay the bills and provide a house for his wife and kids. He is a truck driver for Federal Express.
“Doing what I can with bikes and cars, that’s what I…. well that’s what I strive to do,” said Rob over a phone line from across the country, in Southern California. “Today the paycheck takes precedent over what I want to be doing.”
Rob works with metal – he has ever since shop class in high school. Moving from cartoons to fine art to metal working, Rob, unlike the saying about a fine wine, is getting better with age. He sat down for a brief few moments after dinner to tell me about his life, passion, skill (or lack there of) and the recent art show he helped Big Iron Joe with.
GARAGE: You do metal work for Big Iron Joe in his shop, correct?
ROB: “Yea, that’s my morning job…. Joe’s shop is pretty much, old school, heating it with a torch, hammering it, kinda rudimentary — crude but I think we make some cool stuff come outta there….”
GARAGE: So tell me about your first bike build.
ROB: “I was trying to teach myself. You know, how the metal wraps and reacts to heat and pressure. I tried to do everything old school with no modern influences. No English Wheel or anything like that just a hammer and torch… Pretty much my whole thing is I don’t want to do anything modern. No modern influence trying to teach myself the metallurgy behind it. How the metal reacts, works and how to work the metal to get the desired effect. Heat and shrink and stretch for the gas tank, that was all hand hammered.”
GARAGE: An English Wheel is too modern for you?
ROB: “Yea, I basically used hammer, obviously had to use a welder, but I didn’t use any of that [English Wheel type of] stuff. Just heated it up until I get the metal to shrink up like I wanted…. It took forever. A lot of people would be able to do it the easy way, or should I say the convenient way. Before we had any of that stuff people were able to build that stuff – Trial by fire, jump into it. When you come out of it you have way more knowledge than just rollin’ it out. You’re more of yourself than the beast. Just more of the craftsmanship of the process.”
GARAGE: Right on. So do you consider yourself an artist?
ROB: “Through high school to college [I] wanted to be a professional artist. Wanted to draw but realized I could parlay that into metal. My father was a mechanic and I grew up at the drag strip. So after a few years with art classes I started focusing more in the metal shop. So I could design something on paper, and then make it into metal. If I could design shit and sit and make it out of metal, that is what really made it.”
GARAGE: That brings me into my next question: Your background, so you grew up always wanting to be an artist but you made the transition to metal working?
ROB: “Yea I wanted to, hell when I was young just drawing, and then getting into more fine art stuff. More design oriented work. Probably like advertising direction, like rendering and stuff like that. I honestly, I don’t want to be arrogant but if I’m good at anything — if I’m best at anything — its art. Which I always question myself why am I doing metal working when I am a far better artist.”
GARAGE: So what is your biggest claim to fame at the moment?
“Getting selected for Build or Bust [reality] show, that but also winning. Joe was on the first season and I was on the second season and then our paths crossed shortly after that.”
GARAGE: “Now that’s the show hosted by Russell Mitchell with Excel Cycles, where you build a bike in 30 days and if it meets their approval you get to go home with the bike. What was that like?”
“Oh hell, that was wild right there. You know, everything was on the line. If you lose you walk away empty handed if you win, you know, you walk away with your dream handed to you. But not handed to you, you have to earn it. When Jesse [James] started doing the Motorcycle Mania and all that Build or Bust off stuff came out, all these guys that you idolize and then have the chance to do it. Not at their level but being categorized in the same arena as them, that’s awesome man… It was the most stressful and rewarding thing I have ever done.”
GARAGE: “So tell me a little bit about the Art show you and Joe had.”
ROB: “It was at Joe’s location obviously and my role in that was basically getting everything ready, cleaning. Make everyone happy and then add all of my crap up. Kay [Harrah], I think he was the main driving force behind it. It was Joe’s idea though, I think. Joe got hooked up with Kay and they got the ball running.”
GARAGE: “So what type of stuff did you have on display?”
“I had about four or five pieces, a water color of a Sabbertooth tiger skull I did and then some metal work: A skull shifter out of a 1960’s school bus all twisted steel shifter with a chain bucket cage around its head. My whole deal is the Bison, that’s my company name: Robby Bison. I had a Bison skull there with a handmade steel frame around it, hanging from the wall.”
GARAGE: “Do you think that this culture and motorcycles have been seen as more pieces of art than before?”
ROB: “Yea actually you that’s what did it for me with motorcycles. I was always into cars growing up, you know 1960s era muscle cars and with my artist background I realized… well let’s say you take a ‘67 Camaro. You take it from the ground up and you might do a bitching job on it but when you’re done people will look at it and kinda say wow that’s a nice ‘67 Camaro but you can’t derive too much from the basic form of it. When you got motorcycles you can have the exact same parts and end up with a completely different bike. That’s what got me, you can express yourself way more with a motorcycle than you can a car. If you do a car, you are still stuck with whatever base model car you have but with a motorcycle you can take it a thousand different directions. Radically alter parts to make it show our artistic talent… To answer your question: Yes.”
GARAGE: “It wasn’t always a ‘cool’ thing to be a mechanic in the past but in the last few years it has seemed to be a growing fad that mechanics are ‘cool.”
ROB: “Yea, that actually kinda pisses me off and now with the industry being down that is going to kind of weedout the people who are just in it the image. That they are a biker or whatever. I get really pissed off when you get all of this culture, which I would say is my, our culture and to see celebrities exploit it basically exploiting it for their benefits to be cool or whatever and basically trashing our culture and then leave it in the ground when they are done with it. I forgot what your question was.”
GARAGE: “Garage is a kind of culture magazine, it doesn’t fit into the typical automotive or motorcycle magazine. A kind of artistic gathering of different cultures, where it is not just skateboarders or not just bikers or cars. How do you see the similar scene in your area?”
ROB: “The way it all gets tied together in my mind, and I don’t see that many people I can group together in that category, people that we talked about that try to claim that they are in that but they aren’t. In my mind — It’s just good people. Guys that are really F****ing into it and live it, they are not just proclaiming to do it — It just turns out that they are bike builders or mechanics.”
So how can you judge a man? By his job, by his social classification or by what he proclaims he is? I don’t think anyone can adequately answer that question, but I can judge how you should not. You cannot judge a man by his occupation or at first glance. By the tattoos on his arms but by what a man does, not from a financial or career stand point, but with his life. Is he good or bad and is he hard working? Rob admitted he was a better artist than a metal worker but he works hard at metal working, hence him winning the Build or Bust show. So you cannot even judge a man by his talent of lack thereof, better yet how hard he uses it.
