Collegio Online

Issue date: 6/14/07 Section: Campus Life

Media Credit: Salman Alkhulif/Collegio Sam Morris, left, and his friend Tim Drake, both juniors in automotive technology, show some of their work in front of their shop, Gooichi Motorsports. The shop is located at 307 S. Broadway.

Putting in a five-speed transmission is no easy task; it takes time, patience. Sam tightens the last bolt and peers over at Tim with a look of exhaust. They shake their heads, then look back at the bike. They gaze at it with a sense of amazement, and more important, achievement.
It's 4:15 a.m., and these two have to go to school in the morning.
For Tim Drake and Sam Morris, both juniors in automotive technology at PSU, life has changed in the eight months since they opened their business, Gooichi Motorsports, at 307 S. Broadway.
While Morris and Drake have been involved in the assembly of motorcycles since they were kids, they say their business reaches an untapped resource.
"I worked at Coyote Customs in Oklahoma, and we knew that there was no other business that offered a business like us," said Morris.
But it was a long road to building it into a successful company.
"We'd always been passionate about building bikes, but once we started it, we knew we had a lot of work to do," Drake said. They started by tweaking their own bikes and taking them to shows around the country to promote their business.
It worked.
"We let our bikes talk for us, and we made some friends and also partners," Morris said. "We have a shop in Santa Monica, California, that does all of our chrome work, and we cooperate a lot with Wild West CC in Dallas for our frame and wheel work."
While Drake and Morris think on a national scale for their business, Gooichi Motorsports takes a more local approach when pursuing customers.
"We just show them our work, and then we can relate to a lot of college students, because we're their age," Morris said. "Then when the school year is over, it's a new circuit of students and a different set of bikes."
Although their age works to their advantage in some cases, it works against them in others.
"There are so many people that don't believe in us because of our age, but maybe our age makes us na've enough not to listen to the skeptics and to build an awesome bike, and give someone a bike that they'll show off to their friends," Morris said.

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