Featured Dealer of the Month - Eastern Performance

Michelle: Hi Brian, can you give me a little summary about your shop and who you are?

Brian: We're a full service shop for American V-Twin motorcycles. We've been in business since 1997. We're a custom shop. We do performance and customization work and a lot of BAKER products including compensators, transmissions, and reverses. I’ve been with Eastern for 17 years and am the vice president”

Michelle: Do you guys specialize in any specific motorcycle?

Brian: We specialize Harley-Davidson, you know the V-Twins. We've done just about all of them. We use to offer a line of choppers back in the day and then we got into a lot of performance work with big motor builds. Some people are trying to get a little more from their stock Harley and will bring them straight to us from the dealership and throw quite a lot at them to make them their own. 

Michelle: Do you know about how many custom bikes you build a year?

Brian: Quite a few. We have a number of techs downstairs. And custom is kind of relative. We don't have a lot of frame builds right now; we have a lot of bolt on trees, 126"s, full air rides, and audio upgrades. 

Michelle: Does the shop own any bikes?

Brian: We don't have one this year yet, but we usually build one per year and set it out to show people all that we can do.

Michelle: What are your favorite BAKER products?

Brian: We do a lot of your compensator kits and the 7-speeds for the newer bikes. Quite a few that we've done over the last few years. The techs only prefer to use BAKER products. The Attitude Adjusters, the Comp Sprocket Kits, the 6-Speeds, and 7-Speeds are the main products we install for customers. The techs are really happy with the BAKER products.

Michelle: What is your favorite bike your shop has built with a BAKER product in it?

Brian: It's one of the owner's bikes that we did. I'm pretty sure it was a 7-Speed we put in there. But it was a blue PM bike, a Road Glide. It was all done up in PM lettering and it had the BAKER 7-Speed in that bike.

Michelle: Does the shop host any events?

Brian: Every Saturday we used to do a first come first serve Saturdays  which draws in a good crowd when the weather is nice here in Maryland. It pulled resources away from the shop so we pulled back on that.

Michelle: Any cool news about your shop?

Brian: We're always trying to expand and always listing new products. We just got back from the Louisville trip for Drag Specialties. We're most likely going to take a couple of the techs to the Drag ride in November. And that's something we're looking forward to.

Michelle: What does American made mean to you?

Brian: Quality. We try to push American made products as much as possible. You know some people are only going to shop for a price point and that's the type of customer they are, but when you want to put something in a bike, and especially from a tech's point of view, you only want to do it once. You don't want to have to go back in there and adjust or fix that. So when you go with an American made product, you get that out of it. The BAKER transmissions is what we try to push in our store. Trying to make sure that anything performance related is of a quality in nature so we're not having to go back in and having to do it twice.

Michelle: What is the best way for a new customer to get in contact with you?

Brian: Our website is generally the easiest way for a follow-up or to get a quote. Of course our main phone line as well. Customers can reach us through our Facebook page, Instagram, all of those. We monitor all of those quite regularly.