The Low of the Land : Candy-flake paint jobs, velour seats, even gold-plated chain-wheels rule the road as youths on two wheels mimic the studied cool of the lowrider car culture.

Teen-age boys are mobbing Ventura County bicycle shops for exotic parts to bolt onto their newest obsession, lowrider bikes.

The sleek, low, shiny machines sport customized candy-flake paint jobs, pounds of chrome and galaxies of mirrors, mimicking the studied cool of Southern California’s lowrider car culture.

Lowrider kids from Oxnard to Simi Valley sink hundreds, even thousands of dollars into their rides. They do it unapologetically, with one thing in mind:

“I just had a dream,” said Peter Reyes 13, of Simi Valley. “I’m gonna build a bike, and it’s gonna be bad .”

Peter’s dream has just begun taking shape in a metal-flake purple Lowrider brand bike.

It is a Taiwan-made knockoff of the bike that most lowriders prize, the 1960s-vintage Schwinn Sting-Ray.

But Peter is already bending it to his vision with a velour seat, dual mirrors and flashy, white-walled, spoke-choked chrome wheels with purple dice valve caps.

“In the near future, I’ll go all out,” he said. “I’ll put sheet metal in the frame and probably get a mural on it . . . and I’ll build a trailer and probably put a speaker system on it.”

Two forces govern lowriders’ dreams: One is cash. The other, creativity.

Parents’ indulgent gifts and teen-agers’ part-time jobs fuel the lust for $120 chrome wheels, $175 paint and coats of plated gold that can cost up to $1,000 for the most extreme customizers.

Many parents consider it money well spent to keep their sons busy, focused and out of trouble.

Peter said he got caught twice for graffiti tagging before he wised up and turned his attention to lowriders.

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And Terry Eichman, 38, of Ventura, said that a certain forest green Schwinn with banana seat and glittering chrome is what keeps her 15-year-old son, Chris Tatum, out of trouble.

“There’s a lot of dads that get into it,” said Phil Carpenter, a Ventura bike shop owner. “They figure, ‘I can’t afford to restore a ’32 roadster, but I sure can afford to fix up my kid’s bike.”

Unfortunately, some fall prey to what Carpenter calls train-set syndrome.

“Over Christmas, I saw a dad looking at a bike with his kid,” said Carpenter, owner of Matt’s Cycling Center. “And he says, ‘Now, the first thing you want to do is take this off and put that on and move that over and put that on.’ And the kid was saying, ‘But Dad, I don’t want to do it that way.”’

Originality is the whole point. The trick is using ideas like no one else’s.

The code of lowrider cool demands a Schwinn-styled starting point. After that, anything goes.

Some start with special store-bought bike frames, others with an old Schwinn snagged from a swap meet or a friend’s basement.

Then they cut and re-weld the bikes so the pedals barely clear the ground and the raked “ape-hanger” handlebars scream attitude.

Hard-core customizers weld flat steel into gaps between the bikes’ frame tubes, grind off the rough edges and smooth the new lines with a popular car-repair putty. The process is called “Bondo-ing.”

The end result is a rubber-tired manifesto, the owner’s vision squeezed to life in radical twists of polychrome paint and bright metal.

Matt Steinert’s “Emerald City II” (named after a friend’s lowrider Chevy) started life as a $10 used Schwinn Beach Cruiser frame.

Many months and nearly $1,000 in chore money later, Matt’s ride is a gold-plated, white-walled three-wheeler with an elaborate back seat upholstered in plush emerald tuck-and-roll velvet.

He never rides it.

“It’s strictly show,” said Matt, 15, of Simi Valley. “It’s ridable, but it’ll mess up my gold on the chain and the chain-wheel.”

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Nonbelievers give the lowrider kids grief.

“I get a lot of it from my school, mostly younger kids,” saiJ. Harms, a 13-year-old lowrider from Simi Valley.

“I told ‘em how much money I’d spent on this,” he said of his Maui-blue Stingray with the cut-out seat post, slick Bondo job and 72-spoke Baby Dayton wheels. “And they say, ‘Oh, I could get a dirt bike for that kind of money.’ ”

Others--even some in the lowriders camp--scoff at fixing up bikes so much that nobody can actually ride them.

A Ventura club of three called the Schwinn Society specializes in modifying full-sized bikes with lowrider styling.

“We call ‘em ‘street-clean,’ ” said president Jimmy Ramirez, 18. “There’s no sense putting a bunch of money into a bike you can’t ride.”

Ramirez has a five-wheeled, Frankenstein of a lowrider fantasy that will marry a Beach cruiser to two tricycle axles and a Go-Kart motor. He rolled out the modified two-wheel rear-ends to show that welding has already begun. But for now he is content to lavish affection and hard-to-find parts on the old Schwinn he used to ride to school, from the candy-cobalt spokes to the tiny steel Schwinn cable anchors that took him forever to find.

Lurking near the top of the lowrider food chain--and the bottom of the money pit--are full-custom machines like Eddie Orozco’s “Above the Rest.”

It used to be a Schwinn Sting-Ray.

Now, fanged demons glower from its candy-apple metal-flake paint job and etched chrome banana seat.

Hand-etched constellations of stars glint on the chromed rims, orbiting around thick, scarlet, powder-coated spokes.

The gold-plated chain-wheel and wicked chrome spearhead pedals almost scrape the floor. And tiny wraiths linger on the mirrors like etched smoke.

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Orozco spared no expense, hiring some of the finest etchers, painters and plating specialists from Oxnard’s lowrider car community to breathe life into his dream. And he built a lush, padded display platform of tuck-and-roll vermilion velvet to show off his beauty.

He began the $4,000 project two years ago with his mom and dad’s support, “just to see if my ideas were good enough, and to beat out the other competitors.”

“In the first car show I went to, I got first place, best of show,” said Orozco, 18, who works at an Oxnard plating shop. “And every show after that, I never got lower than second place.” But he does not dare ride it. And he can never sell it.

“I wouldn’t get what I put into it,” he said ruefully. “I think I spent too much money on it. I feel I wasted it on nothing.”