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Orange County Choppers, in the small town of Montgomery, New York (about 50 miles north of New York City), was the home of both high-end, custom-build motorcycles and an ongoing family soap opera. The shop’s founder was loud, heavyset, walrus-mustached Paul Teutul, Sr., who drove his crew mercilessly to produce chrome-laden supercharged choppers for celebrities and others on a tight schedule. His chief foil was beefy son Paulie, who was undeniably talented but at times a bit of a slacker, arriving late and not working as fast as Dad would have liked (“It took the frickin’ whole day to build this!?”). The two squabbled constantly about everything, while son Mikey added occasional comic relief.
Most of the work was done by Paulie and his team, which included Vinnie, Rick, Cody and others who came and went; Dad bellowed and supervised while Mikey flitted in and out. There were also road trips to test and deliver the motorcycles around the country and occasional timeouts for recreation such as hunting and snowmobiling. Most of the workers were beefy, tattooed ‘men’s men’ – this was testosterone TV – and it was a considerable hit on the normally wonky Discovery Channel. Later the series moved to Discovery’s sibling channel TLC.
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