Michael Schacht’s story is one of perseverance and passion. Yet, despite Schacht’s dedication, his story also is one that serves as a reminder that you can’t please everyone all of the time.

Originally in the auto business and a collector of vintage motorcycles, the Toronto native developed an affinity for early American bikes during the 1980s. His first love was Indians, and he soon found himself partnering with a group of fellow motorcycle enthusiasts intent on breathing new life into the defunct brand. But Schacht claims that after he learned of the group’s plans—plans he describes as "blasphemy"—he severed ties with them and set out to restore only vintage examples. That journey led him to a fellow enthusiast in Toronto who dabbled in such restorations, and before long they had made an acquaintance with an avid collector in Pennsylvania whose barn was home to an assemblage of extremely rare American classics: Clevelands, Iver Johnsons, Thors, and two unrestored Crockers. When the Pennsylvanian entrusted them with both Crocker restorations, Schacht had an idea. "It was extremely rare, as far as I was concerned," he recalls thinking of the Crocker brand. "I had resurrection on the brain and I was still all charged up, and thought it could be a niche production. This was a motorcycle that had a name as high as Rolls-Royce and Bentley. It was the finest of the finest."

At that moment, Schacht set in motion the plans to resurrect the Crocker brand. But little did he know that such plans would span more than a decade and would require him to uproot his life, endure numerous legal battles, and invest every dollar he had.

An LA Story
By the beginning of the new millennium, Schacht and the fellow Toronto restorer had committed to the idea of restoring not just a Crocker bike, but the Crocker brand. They made the business official in 2001, founding Crocker Motorcycle Co. Inc., and for the next four years they met with engineers and pattern makers and painstakingly reverse-engineered as many Crocker parts as they could find. A bartering system began to take form, where Schacht and his team would borrow a part from a vintage Crocker owner and create a pattern from it. As a way of compensation, when they returned it, they would also provide that owner with a new part made from modern-day materials. Word slowly spread about this service, and soon Schacht was manufacturing parts for numerous vintage Crocker owners. In fact, he says that’s a service that he continues to provide today.

The business was not without its problems, however. When Schacht and his partner discovered that they had radically different plans for the future of the company, something had to be done. In the end, a two-year-long legal battle saw the company declare bankruptcy.

But Schacht remained undeterred.

He purchased the company and its assets at auction in 2008 and, after selling everything he owned, Schacht packed two suitcases, a 53-foot trailer full of every Crocker motorcycle part that he had, and set out to reestablish Crocker Motorcycle Co. (www.crockermotorcycleco.com) in Los Angeles, where the brand had been born more than 70 years before. "We’ve turned it back into an LA story again," he says.

Difficult Beginnings
By all known accounts, Al Crocker, the brand’s original founder, faced equally difficult circumstances when he unveiled his first motorcycle in 1936.

The Northwestern graduate’s first job out of school was as an engineer in the motorcycle division of Chicago-based Aurora Automatic Machinery Co., a division known for producing Thors. While his profession cast him as an engineer, Crocker’s passion for motorcycles made him a racer. During those racing years, Crocker met Oscar Hedstrom and Charles Hendee, Indian Motorcycle’s president and chief engineer, respectively. A cordial relationship soon developed between them, which led to Crocker’s full-time position at Indian and the start of a new chapter in his life, in Southern California.

But it wasn’t long before Crocker’s desire to build bikes of his own motivated him to sell his Indian dealership in Los Angeles and open the Crocker Motorcycle Co. He started with 30- and 50-cu in single-cylinder speedway bikes, which quickly became the local racers’ motorcycle of choice. Ultimately, Crocker built about 30 of them before turning his attention to a more substantial V-twin road bike. Partnering with Paul Bigsby, a master mechanic, pattern maker, draftsman, and competition rider, Crocker built original designs by hand, establishing a style known as the bobber, for its low-slung frame, balanced stance, and streamlined front and rear fenders.

"Styling is in the eye of the beholder, but my Crocker was a beautiful machine," Homer Wood, the first Crocker customer, said in a letter written in 2004. "Its appeal lay in proportions and simplicity. It looked and was rugged. Crockers displayed the work of a single designer with fresh new ideas and sound aesthetics. They radiated a macho power with graceful themes."

A Crocker may have had a definitive look during the 1930s and ’40s, but it was its performance that made it truly identifiable. Al Crocker built each bike to order and, as a result, always was tinkering with the machines’ mechanics and capabilities. At a time when the best Indians and Harley-Davidsons were reaching 85 mph, Crockers were rushing past them at triple-digit speeds.

Many modern-day Crocker enthusiasts continue to piece together facts and accounts from the era in which Al Crocker produced such revolutionary vehicles, and some, like Chuck Vernon, an 89-year-old former collector and the author of the Crocker Registry, have discovered that—not surprisingly—the major motorcycle companies of the day did all they could to prevent Crocker from succeeding. Unscrupulous in their efforts, the industry’s major brands were known to coerce parts manufacturers away from Crocker and to slap him with lawsuits anytime one of his bikes displayed a part that bore any resemblance to theirs. "How audacious was it for Crocker, with the help of Bigsby, to think they could take on the giants of the world and make a better motorcycle?" Chuck Vernon asks rhetorically. "Al Crocker, in a little shop in Los Angeles, could turn out a few motorcycles with the same bore, same stroke, the same valve and cc size and—with only 10 pounds’ difference in weight—run Harleys off the road."

Such an accomplishment has not gone unnoticed, especially by those who have experience restoring the few vintage examples that still remain. "He was a pretty crafty fellow," Steve Huntzinger, a Southern California–based restorer, says of Al Crocker. "To take on and make a complete motorcycle is pretty astounding."

Discovering the Value
The number of motorcycles that Al Crocker produced is enigmatic. Some have projected that he completed as many as 300, while others suggest just over 60 were built. According to Vernon, over a seven-year-period, Crocker produced fewer than 100 motorcycles—probably 70 complete machines—in small-tank (1936 to 1938) and large-tank (1939 to 1942) variations. After the United States entered World War II in 1941, Crocker found it too difficult to source the necessary materials to continue building motorcycles and, as a sign of the times, converted his factory to produce materials for the war effort. The year 1942 would be the last that Al Crocker built a motorcycle.

Enthusiasts who have taken to the restoration of vintage American motorcycles, like David Hansen, owner of The Shop (www.cycleshop.com) in Ventura, Calif., have known for years that Crockers epitomized a classic design. "They’re just a great motorcycle," he says. "They embody all the best features of the Harley-Davidsons, Indians, and the Excelsior."

Vernon concurs. "They meet every definition of the classic," he says. "They’re a work of art. They’re handcrafted. Only a few were produced. And they’re high performance."

Despite experts’ long-standing love affairs with the brand, a Crocker motorcycle held little value in the collector market from the 1960s through the end of the 1990s. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that touring exhibitions of vintage, museum-quality motorcycles brought the obscure brand to the public’s eye. At that point, it was as if a switch had been flipped. Suddenly—and exacerbated in large part due to such a limited number of existing bikes—a Crocker motorcycle was a six-figure commodity. At a MidAmerica auction in January 2008, a 1939 Crocker Big Tank sold for $230,000, and according to Hansen, any restored Crockers that come to market today are selling for upward of $350,000.

As one might expect, that surge in value has made the sight of a Crocker, either complete or in fragmented form, a much more common occurrence. "More people are bringing out the bits and pieces and building motorcycles out of them," Hansen says, "because they know that it’s going to be a very valuable addition to their collection."

Shades of Gray
The current vintage motorcycle landscape, as it relates to Crockers, is anything but simple.

Because so few examples are known to exist, and with their value growing significant only in the last decade, a vintage Crocker with all original components is all but impossible to find. What can be found are restored bikes boasting small- to medium-sized percentages of modern machined parts, though they’re parts still fabricated to follow the known blueprints drafted by Al Crocker in the 1930s and ’40s.

"When [Crockers] weren’t worth anything and had no value to speak of, parts would get taken off of one and put on another to make them better," says Huntzinger, who, while working out of his home garage, has restored five Crockers. He says that all bikes need new exhausts and new handlebars, but he has acquired original patterns to assure that those parts are made to the right specifications. "I’m taking probably 80 percent of [Crocker’s] motorcycle and making 20 percent of the parts." In fact, Huntzinger says he loaned Schacht a number of original patterns for his work to revitalize the Crocker brand.

In many ways, this has been Michael Schacht’s greatest contribution to the industry to this point. While Schacht is machining parts with the goal of building complete Crocker motorcycles, he has provided—through his bartering system—the necessary materials to fuel existing restoration efforts. "Prior to Michael’s involvement, the parts were a finite set and that set was diminishing by the day," Hansen says. "With Michael devoting 10 years of his life to making this Crocker dream come true, he’s allowed people like myself to finish motorcycles that wouldn’t be finished or [would be] finished at a much higher cost due to having to machine parts."

Despite such a symbiotic relationship, however, many vintage motorcycle restorers—including Huntzinger and Hansen—don’t share Schacht’s opinion that the motorcycles he builds today are the same as those built 70-plus years ago. "If he finishes one of his bikes and it’s a 100-point bike and runs and is beautiful, it won’t bring the money that number 13 would sitting next to it because it’s a clone," Huntzinger says. "It’s a beautiful clone, but it’s still a clone. They’ll never be in the same category as a real one."

"There will always be a difference," Hansen adds. "It won’t be a 1941 Big Tank Crocker," he says of a future bike produced by Schacht, "but it can be a 2012 Big Tank Crocker made with modern materials and following the plans that Al Crocker had in the ’40s. There’s always going to be two schools of thought. You’ll get staunch guys who are saying it’s not a real Crocker; it’s a reproduction. And yes, it’s a reproduction, but it’s a faithful reproduction."

A Passion-Fueled Project
Michael Schacht’s current headquarters is small and unassuming, but Al Crocker started from humble beginnings as well. Schacht’s 350-square-foot space in South Bay, Calif., is lined with shelves stacked with wheels, transmissions, clutches—everything needed for a full assembly. He doesn’t need much more than that because, on a given day, Schacht is driving to any one of the more than 10 foundries and aerospace firms that have partnered with him to produce all of his necessary parts. "The materials are much better, the tolerances are much tighter, and we’ve made some corrections to some things internally," he says of those components. "It will be identical," he adds, referring to the completed bike that he envisions, "but superior."

Schacht expects to unveil that completed bike, a Big Tank design with all original elements, including a foot clutch and handbrake, later this month, and he will ceremoniously drive it down the alleyway behind the site of Al Crocker’s original shop—a tradition that Crocker started with his first V-twin in 1936. A new, vintage-styled Crocker will cost about $135,000, which even Schacht admits is a far cry from the cost of a restored original, though he acknowledges that he’s "never been geared much toward commerce." Fourteen bikes will be made, two of which will remain as company models for demonstration purposes, and (at the time that this story went to press) Schacht says that orders can still be placed for a handful of the remaining examples.

However, of greater importance to Schacht is his assertion that the 21st-century iteration of Al Crocker’s brand is as true today as it was 75 years ago. "We have the blessing of the Crocker family," he says. "We’ve gone the extra mile to prove that we’re not interlopers out there trying to exploit someone else’s brand. We are Crocker. We built the company in the same vein and with the same passion that Al Crocker did."

While Schacht’s future line of motorcycles may provoke a variety of interpretations and opinions, the passion of which he speaks is well known throughout the industry. "The kid has thrown his whole life into this project," says Hansen, "and passion has to count for a hell of a lot."