The caption is seven words long: “year of blood, sweat, and tears.” The 23 second reel that @connorgregus posted under it shows what that year produced, a low, stripped down bobber on air suspension, and it does so without a word of narration or a line of text on the screen.

It opens in a garage. A builder with dark curly hair stands beside a nearly finished motorcycle, both hands working at the handlebars. A bare wheel hangs from the ceiling in the corner of the shot, hand tools cover the pegboard behind him, and the concrete floor is scattered with parts and rags. The bike already has its shape: spoked wheels, a solo seat, a matte tank and very little else.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Then the reel cuts outdoors, and the same bike is parked on a pale concrete bridge deck beside a white railing with trees behind it. From there the edit keeps swapping back and forth every few seconds. One beat is the garage, the next is the finished machine somewhere green.

The garage shots show the stages of the work. In one, there is only a bare frame up on a stand with a front wheel sitting ahead of it, an orange extension cord looped across the floor and someone in shorts standing alongside. In another, the bike has its tank and front end but the rear is stripped, and it sits on blocks in a corner crowded with dirt bikes and a ladder. In a third it is mostly back together, wheels on, tank on, with those same dirt bikes lined up behind it and shelves of bottles and jugs along the wall.

The outdoor shots are the reward. First comes a lawn at sunset, the sun breaking through a row of trees and the camera down at grass level beside the front tire. Next is a roadside field edged with boulders, a car passing in the background. Last is a hilltop with a wide valley spread out below and the bike in full profile: V twin engine, two exhaust pipes, a tan and silver tank, spoked wheels front and rear. In every one of those shots the bike is sitting very low, with the bottom of the frame close to the grass.

The hashtags explain why. Two of them are #airride and #bagged. Air ride means the bike rides on air springs in place of conventional ones, so the rider can let the air out to drop the bike when it is parked and add air to lift it back to a usable height before riding. “Bagged” is the common shorthand for a vehicle set up that way. It is the reason a parked bike can look like it has been set down on the lawn.

That is everything the post offers. There is no parts list, no make or model, no cost and no account of what went wrong along the way. The reel is a handful of garage clips, a handful of finished shots, and one sentence about how long it took and what it took out of him.

Even so, there are a few things here that anyone with a project bike can use.

Film the ugly stages. This reel works because the builder had footage of the bare frame and the half assembled bike to cut against the sunset shots. A finished photo alone would not show a year of work. If you are starting a build, prop a phone in the same corner of the garage every few weeks and record a few seconds. You will want it later.

Get the frame up off the floor. The bare frame in the reel is on a stand, not on the concrete. Working at a comfortable height makes long nights easier and makes it harder to lose small parts.

Plan on it taking longer than a season. This builder puts the figure at a year, in a garage he shares with several other bikes. Going in with that kind of timeline in mind is easier than being surprised by it halfway through.

If air ride is the goal, think about the parked height and the riding height as two separate setups. With the air out, check that the tires clear the fenders and that nothing important is the first thing to touch the ground. With the air in, make sure the suspension still has room to move. Keep air lines away from the exhaust and anything that spins, check every fitting for leaks, and look up what your state requires for modified suspension before the bike goes in for inspection.