Michael Currin
Road Warrior

PASSION
Motorcycling
PROFESSION
Systems analyst
HOMETOWN
Erwin, N.C.

It was seeing the tough guy always get the girl in biker movies that lured IEEE Member Michael Currin to motorcycles. He stayed for the speed and the thrill.

“I started riding as soon as I got a driver’s license at 16, and I quickly got hooked,” Currin says. “I went through my chopper phase—riding bikes with the long front end, which actually degraded handling and comfort but looked cool.”

As he got older, he acquired BMWs (a K11RS and an R80RT), which, he says, are more about performance and comfort. Currin now has six motorcycles.

He is an operations-research systems analyst for the U.S. Army Airborne and Special Operations Test Directorate at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. More than 35 years after he got on his first bike, he still rides almost every day, including during his 80-­kilometer round trip to work.

But these days he’s part of a niche group of riders. “I’m a motorcyclist who’s evolved into a sidecarist,” he says. Currin builds high-performance sidecars, one-wheeled devices that attach to a motorcycle and carry one or two people. The souped-up suspensions and other custom and performance features can run US $18 000 to $20 000.

His younger son, Jake, got him interested in sidecars. Jake was born with cerebral palsy and is unable to use his legs. “I realized he’d never be able to ride on the back of a motorcycle, so I started looking into sidecars,” Currin says. “I also built a trailer to haul his wheelchair that rides behind his sidecar. When he was a toddler, I’d take him to school in the sidecar, and the other kids would line up to watch him ride up.”

When Currin, with Jake, had trouble keeping up during motorcycle rallies—­at which enthusiasts gather and ride in groups—he modernized his original sidecar with an improved suspension that can handle car tires, rather than motorcycle tires. “It puts more rubber on the road for better traction and stability, as well as getting around corners faster,” he explains.

The rest of his family is involved in his hobby. Currin built another sidecar for his older son, Cody, and a motorcycle trike—a three-wheeled motorcycle—for his wife.

But the family-friendly bikes are a lot tougher than they look, he says: “I see 60-year-old motorcyclists with sidecars outrunning the kids on sport bikes.”