People still ask Marix Stone about his 15 minutes of television fame, the one where he had what he calls "a Looney Tunes" moment and stepped on his tongue in front of a bunch of "sharks" and a national TV audience.

"Ya, people still mention that," he says of his January 2010 appearance on the ABC reality television show "Shark Tank," which stars five Wall Street types who hear proposals from entrepreneurs and then decide on whether to invest in their businesses. "But I wouldn't say I'm riding that wave anymore."

Stone's business, Hells Bells Customs, is a Philadelphia company that sells custom-made, handcrafted, sculpted 3-D motorcycle helmets. And sure, his foray into reality television created some short-term buzz that translated into increased sales, despite his television performance.

Essentially, Stone says he over-prepared for his appearance in front of the sharks and got tongue-tied during his presentation, so much so that ABC promoted that show ahead of its airing as "A biker who botches his presentation for a three-dimensional helmet."

But what the TV venture really did was enable Stone to expand his business into custom-made motorcycle gas tanks and fenders to display his artistic talents, one of the only � if not the only � artists doing this type of work for the world of bikers.

"Art, that's what we're selling, even with the helmets," says Stone, who has been making three-dimensional motorcycle helmets for the past four years out of his fifth-floor warehouse apartment in the city's Kensington neighborhood, which serves as both living quarters and workshop.

"We're not selling helmets, we're selling artistry. That's what my whole thing is. It's about the art and crafting something that is unique and different that fits a biker's personality. That's what we've done all along."

And now he's picked up production of the three-dimensional "war artistry" on gas tanks and fenders, something that Stone said bikers have always desired.

"Even when people were buying the helmets, they would always ask, 'What could I get for tank or what could I get for me fender?' Now we can do that," said Stone.

"All I'm doing is taking an evolution of it. When I started out I was airbrushing tanks and fenders. I was giving the illusion that things were three-dimensional," he said. "But even my art, with my airbrush, I couldn't make it look as three-dimensional as real 3-D piece."

The reality show experience and its aftermath was only part of the journey that has taken Stone from being a drummer in a rock band in the 1980s in Ohio, through DisneyWorld and being a Soho art gallery owner in the 1990s and now as the creator and manufacturer of three-dimensional motorcycle helmets, gas tanks and fenders.

"I never went to any art school or anything like that, but I had some art skills that I was lazy with," said Stone. "I got to a point where I needed to reshape my life, and a friend of mine told me (in 1984) that there were plenty of jobs at Disney. So I just took a bus ride down to Florida."

Once there, he signed on for what he called "grunt work" because "Disney loved people then who weren't schooled or who went to college in certain fields. That way they could shape you the Disney way."

He said he was willing to do any type of work and that the only thing that really bothered him was the Disney dress code, that whole "short hair and no tattoos" thing. Stone eventually became a sculptor at Disney, and in his spare time, taught himself the art of airbrushing. He eventually opened his own airbrushing shop in 1991.

"A customer came into my place one day--he had seen some sculpture work that I had done --and he asked me, 'How come you can't do what you do for Disney on my motorcycle?'

"You know how you kind of do things and never put two and two together? Here I was working in that field (sculpting) and it was a customer's idea to do three-dimensional war artistry. That was the lightbulb moment."

All the metal work is sculpted. It's a cast piece, so Stone does the actual sculpture work in clay or other material and makes a master mold, then casts the actual appliqu�. It's bonded to a gas tank by a heat process. The helmet process is similar, the patent of which is owned by Stone.

"It's centuries old war artistry," said Stone. "All I did was resurrect that and put it into the motorcycle world because that was a large group of people I connected with because I was a biker myself."

And once again, the television world has noticed. The FX television show "Sons of Anarchy," a show about a close-knit group of outlaw bikers from Northern California that is in its third season, ordered 10 of Stone's helmets to use in the show.

"They haven't shown up on the series yet, not that I've seen," said Stone. "We figure what happened is that they filmed a lot of stuff and put it in the can and they haven't used the helmets yet."

But the addition of gas tanks and fenders is just an extension of the helmets, according to Stone.

"Same concept, same everything except now this is metal," he said. "With the actual prototype of a tank, I have a better palette with which to work. The gas tanks and fenders are just so much bigger, I can do one-of-a-kind work. This opens up a whole new wave of stuff."

Although Stone has in the past done all the work himself, he now has a couple people who help him, which has freed him of most of the work on the helmets and allowed him more time to concentrate on the gas tanks and fenders.

"That leaves me the time to create new stuff and get this type of metal work out there," he said.

MIKE MORSCH is a veteran Greater Philadelphia journalist, diehard Phillies fan and all-around swell guy. Send feedback here.

PHOTOS:

Marix Stone in his Port Richmond studio

Mold work results and process at Hells Bells

More of Marix's mold process

Marix laying down 3D work on a gas tank

Fender detailing

Helmet detail

All photos by MICHAEL PERSICO