Every great piece of art starts with a blank canvas, and when it comes to building a custom motorcycle, a masterpiece starts with the frame. That’s where Xavier Muriel stands in the process of creating High Seas Rally’s new custom motorcycle, which will go home with a very lucky member of the HSR community after the next cruise.

In this dispatch From The Garage With Xavier, our award-winning bike builder reports back from California, where he collaborated with Rick Bray of RKB Kustom Speed to design and build the bike’s frame from scratch. Each component of the frame was cut, bent, turned, heated, shaped, formed and finished by hand from raw materials.

Xavier is keeping his full vision for the custom bike close to the vest, but revealed that the final product will stake out a middle ground between chopper and bobber. “The colors or paint won’t show itself till much longer down the road, when it starts to come alive,” Xavier reports.

Now more 40 hours into the build, Xavier says the work is less physical, more mental. You spend hours on an idea only for it to be replaced with a better one.

“The whole process is a fun one, watching pipe and plate go from its original form to 40 hours later a foundation on which to build a custom bike,” he says. “It’s kind of like the process of building a home or writing a song. It’s both a creative process and labor intensive to try and transfer something from a vision in your mind’s eye to a physical object that you can touch and feel. I’m certain that once completed this will be an awesome motorcycle.”

Xavier says he’s inspired to build a custom HSR bike that will make your jaw drop. He says he wants High Seas Rally guests to want it so bad that they will buy as many raffle tickets as possible, generating a huge amount of money for the HSR Dialysis Fund.

For ongoing updates on Xavier’s progress, including special videos, photographs and anecdotes from the garage, sign up for the HSR e-newsletter here.