The Need For Speed

It may look like a garage sale on wheels, but it's really a bit of engineering that is on the road to a place in history. CBS News Correspondent Drew Levinson reports.

When 67-year-old Leon Chassman cruises his neighborhood near Detroit, he doesn't look like a man on a mission. But he is - ever since the day he decided he wanted to build the fastest things on two wheels.

With 1,500 speeds on his bike, Chassman has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records. But a record number of speeds wasn't his goal. Speed was.

The idea surfaced a few years ago, when the retired papermaker was at a wedding. The conversation turned to bikes and gears.

"They were saying which gear would be the best to use, and I said, 'I'll make a 1,000-speed bike,'" he explains.

He went home, put pen to paper, then screwdriver to whatever he could find and 18 months later, he came up with a record-breaker.

The cost of the bike parts? $15. But he says it's priceless. It's made of parts from 27 difference cycles and, as he puts it, whatever else he could find laying around. An old salad bowl makes up the front of the bike, and a five-pound pickle barrel brings up the rear.

But it is the intricate configuration of gears that makes his bike remarkable. Chassman says the 105-pound rocket can go from a standing start to 40 mph in a quarter mile. Now he just wants a chance to prove it to the Guinness people.

First, he needs to find somebody with a strong young set of legs to power the cruiser. At his age, he says he just wears out too fast. He says that when he rides the bike to the shopping center up the street, cars that are stopped at the traffic light often don't move when the signal turns green, so busy are the drivers gawking at the contraption.

Chassman believes that everybody's here on Earth here to do something, and building his bike might be his mission. As he puts it, "Something to live for. Something to do. Something to achieve."

As for his next goal, the sky's the limit: He wants to build a helicopter.