Ep #23: 35 Years of Mountain Biking Innovation with Richard Cunningham

Founder and CEO of Pivot Cycles, Chris Cocalis, sits down with Richard Cunningham to take a look back at Chris' early years in the mountain bike industry and how the framework for Pivot Cycles was built over thirty years ago. From hand built and brazed titanium frames to creating new standards that pushes the industry forward, this episode is chock full of mountain bike history and stories most have never heard. 

Transcript

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In today's episode of the Pivot All About Bikes podcast, we have an impressive amount of history on the plate. Chris Cocalis talks with Richard Cunningham. Each of them influenced the industry in its path, while Chris almost became an accountant and Richard built bikes and started a bike magazine. Their stories alone could cover multiple episodes of our podcast, so they will focus on something specific. It is a 35th anniversary of Building Bikes for Chris. The history that goes along with it

and how all the talented people working now at Pivot met and discovered their shared vision for excellence. Together with RC, they dive in and discuss their 80s. An idea about a bike, hot neon pink color, bottom brackets with titanium axles that won't break, elevated chainstays, long stems and fast forward to the bikes we ride today. Pursuing perfection along the way.

I'm Chris Cocalis with Pivot Cycles, and this is our All About Bikes podcast. Today, I've got a special friend that I've known for a long time, Richard Cunningham, formerly of Mantis Bicycles and Mountain Bike Action fame, and then Pinkbike for, how many years were you at Pinkbike, Richard? I think about nine years. Nine years. And now we're just good friends, but we've known each other since 1987, and-

We're talking about the 35 year anniversary of the first Talon frame. And I thought of really no one better to kind of tell that story and for us to dive into a little bit of the history of the sport and kind of where we're at today and welcome Richard. Well, it's good to be here. So we actually met before he made the Talon frame, he showed us, when I was at Mantis little bicycle company and...

We had some fame and people used to drop into Mantis all the time from the industry, sometimes as big as Shimano or Suntour, sometimes as small as little inventors and stuff. And so I got a call and he says, hey, I want to show you something I built and get your opinion on it. And this guy shows up from Arizona with his girlfriend in tow. That would be Cindy, right? Yeah. That's a long relationship right there.

Actually might have been pretty Cindy. Yeah, it was I think it was 1987 I had I had a picture of a mantis frame up in my dorm room I was 18 or 19 years old and yeah a good friend of mine moved out to Southern, California You did a weekly ride. I think in Chino Hills. Yep, and He said he got to ride with Richard Cunningham

And so yeah, I wanted to come meet you. That was a tough ride to follow. Yes. We had a rule that we would wait for three weeks out of the month. And then after that, whoever brought that person into the group had to stay at all the turn points and then they have three months to get up to speed, but we'd wait until the three months was over and that was it. So it was, it was a tough group, but anyway, I didn't get three months, but fortunately I.

I did have my friend though who would take me up on those same hills a lot of switchbacks and he had gotten Extremely fit riding with you guys. He'd ride up to the next switchback and yell come on pussy He used to be the wrestling coach at Arizona State University and he just kind of had that type of attitude. Oh my Well, anyway, so basically turned out to be a bottom bracket with external cups I think it took Shimano how many years to figure out the external cups

I don't know if that came around 2006, 2007, that timeframe. But anyway, he shows me this bottom bracket and was the snake cycles, I think it was, right? Snakes, everything is a desert theme at Pivot. And now you know, go to fizzy. Anyway, so it was this awesome bottom bracket, double rail bearings with external cups, titanium shaft. It was like the bottom bracket.

And at the time, almost every mountain bike component came from a road bike somewhere. The brakes came from France. Everything was substandard. And it turned out that Chris had broken just about everything on a mountain bike by the time he got to the bottom of the practice. But it was really good. And one of the things that happened was most of the stuff that we would see, they'd say, hey, is this a good mountain bike part? Is this crank something that you'd like?

But they would always be in prototype form. Sometimes Shimano or some of the big guys would show us a pre-production thing. This was like everything. The bottom rack was in production. The box was cool. The packaging. It turns out later on, Chris did all the packaging, even coloring the boxes, but it was in production. It was just, I thought this guy knows his crap. And I was blown away. And then he, you know, I asked him.

you going to be able to sell these things? Because I'd already been butting heads with the industry on just about every other component. And he goes, yeah, you know, I think I'm going to sell them. And then he drove back to Arizona. And I thought, you know, that guy, I'm going to I am going to see that guy somewhere down the road. This isn't the last time I'm going to see him. And the next time I heard his name was the Talon. Now.

The Talon was an elevated chainstay bike, and I'd already established a bit of a reputation for elevated chainstay bikes at Mantis. But what people didn't know is that I had been writing and consulting with the guys at Mountain Bike Action, Zapata Espinosa and Jody Weisel. Whenever they had new bikes, they would bring them up to Mantis and I'd weigh them and measure them and tell them what I thought about them. Here's this Talon, and it's Chris Cocalis I'm like, what the hell?

So how did that bike come out of your mind after you were the bottom bracket guy? Yeah, it was interesting. The bottom bracket thing was, I had just gotten into mountain biking and from the history of BMX and I would break a spindle sometimes twice a week. It was just crazy. And I met a machine shop guy and said, let's try this and let's support it this way.

basically got it to where the next thing we were breaking was the crank arms, but got the bottom bracket to be reliable. And I just got super into what was going on with on the mountain bike side. I had drawn up BMX frames in the past. As I mentioned, I had a picture of your Nishiki Alien elevated chainstay bike hanging up in my dorm room. And I was managing a bike store and a guy came.

And he was actually the original founder of Norba and he had brazed my partner Alan Vaughn at Sun Eagle bicycle works and he had brazed this frame and it was super steep and super weird and It was not straight and I rode around the parking lot and I'm like, did you did you build this yourself and he did and I had already been doing like full-size hand drawings of bicycle frames and

what I wanted for my perfect geometry. And so I said, I'll draw the bikes and we can like lay everything out so that they ride great if, if you'll teach me how to braze So I started going over to his house in the afternoons and evenings. And that was that we built, uh, I don't know the entire production life of that bike was 12 units, maybe, but one of them, one of Alan's

frames we took to mountain bike action. Well, it was pretty unique. I mean, there's some pretty crappy bikes out back then. And this was like, you know, it's triangulated well. Everything was right. And I'm not sure whether Zapper or the test riders, because I wasn't a test rider at the time. I just saw the bike and it has a really cool splatter paint job, which at the time was like the thing, you know. For sure. Jackson Pollock look.

And that was the second time I thought, well, he's making bikes now, you know? But so did you braze the bikes yourself as well? Yeah. You know, it was interesting that one we took to mountain bike action. I was so proud of my first one that I built all by myself. The first pink talon and being a selfish 19 year old kid. There was no way I was going to leave that one. The perfect example off at the magazine.

Now it would be the complete opposite. You always leave the perfect one off the magazine. So, you know, this one was done a little quicker and maybe it wasn't quite as straight and the angles weren't as right. And it's like literally looking back on it, it was not one I would personally ride. So I can't believe like why we would make the decision that that's the one that got left of the magazine. And I felt you guys and Zap was incredibly nice saying that it's a perfect desert machine.

Well, now back to your BMX time. So you had a pro license out of high school, and you came to Arizona under the guise that you were going to get a college education so you could race BMX. At least that's how the story is that I remember. Yeah, that is correct. I had a scholarship to University of Illinois for running track, and I didn't want to stay in Illinois. And much to my parents' disappointment,

left that and decided to come here simply because I could race every night of the week. And when you were in Indiana in high school, you took every shop class you could possibly take. Illinois. Illinois? Illinois. What's the difference between Indiana and Illinois? A couple L's. Yeah, and cows. Cows, both have cows. They make cars and yeah, anyway. So they're both flat. I did the same thing. I actually went.

to summer school before I went to high school so I could take metal shop my first year. And I took metal shop and wood shop, everything. I learned how to operate everything. How is it that you didn't learn how to weld in high school? You know, I was in auto shop and I went through all kinds of woods classes. So like I made furniture, I made a hydroplane boat, did all this stuff with wood.

And, uh, and even did some bicycle frame stuff where I get like crappy Murray's or Huffy's that were Pixie or women's frames and cut the tubes, but then I We had a guy at a lawnmower shop and he welded and I just say you put this here and he would Do it for a few bucks. And yeah, I just didn't never had a welder at the house. Didn't have that skill set at the time Well, maybe that's the magic

of your whole career is that if you didn't have a skill rather than do it poorly, you handed it off to somebody that could do a better job. Because you're looking at the end result, at least in my 37 years of knowing you, perfection is like the only goal. And good enough. And you got to find a way. Good enough is how craftsmen work.

You get it as perfect as you can. And if it's outside your skill set, you just do it as best you can. And then don't look at that part when you're done. But that's not you. Not typically. So I got a couple of questions. When you were doing BMX, I know you taught BMX classes and you taught skills. Did you ever want to get into the bicycle industry as somebody making stuff?

It wasn't mountain bikes that inspired you to make bicycles and bicycle parts because they suck so much. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't actively trying to get in the bicycle industry. That wasn't like, I want a job in the bicycle industry. I started hanging out at the bike shop in our Chicago suburb. When I was nine years old, it was the Grom they couldn't get rid of. Take out the garbage. Here's some stickers. Go home. Um, and, uh, and then.

I've told this story before, but it was basically there was a, the parks and rec had different classes you could take. And one of them was bicycle repair class. And it was really for parents to take care of their kids' bikes. And the same bike shop that I wouldn't leave alone was putting this class on. So you had to be 16 and I was like 10. And so my mom had to go petition that I could take the.

bicycle repair class and they let me but it was a one and done thing it's like here's how you fix your flats and then bring all your other stuff and i'd sign up for it every fall every spring and so then they would put me in back with the mechanics and go up there chris and they'll teach you how to take apart a three-speed hub and whatnot and so i would do that and then just started working in bike shops at some point

14, 15 years old and then eventually working for the shop that I raced for all the way through the time that I stopped racing BMX here. So, but during that time, BMX bikes were pretty good. So I imagine you didn't have to really reinvent everything, but you were pretty fit. I mean, I see pictures of you back then and you're just like ripped, your shoulders, your upper body looked like you were in the gym every single day and you were just racing BMX every single week.

Yeah, it was all in the off season. It was about lifting weights and we ran like 190, 195 crank arms and big gears. And basically sometimes you'd rip the front end off a bike coming out of the gate. That's, it was all about laying down the power as quickly as possible and not about pumping and smooth and jumps were much more evil, Knievel. You pedal in the air is just a different

time and but back in 82, 83, BMX parts sucked. I mean, the cranks were the same size spindle that mountain bikes started with, that road bikes had, two degree taper spindle. And you can imagine on a BMX bike with those loads, those things would just break. And my dad would take me back to the bike shop before I was sponsored by the shop. And it was like every week I'd bend or break another crank set or another spindle. That was kind of like.

things I'd go through and the name of the shop was Sundance and the owner Jim, he took care of me so many times and then basically was like, maybe this part isn't right for you. And around those times, like redline flight crank came out and there was big spindle, three piece crank, big bearings. And then that problem was solved. But hub flanges would break when they were tall hub flanges. Yeah.

You'd land a little sideways, the wheel would flex, and then the whole hub flange would crack around it. So it's not like, didn't see and experience all this crap. And I had two paper routes. My parents didn't buy the stuff for me. So it was frustrating and to find the stuff that works and then to relive it with mountain bikes. That's the story I want you to tell because you pretty much don't have patience for crap.

I mean, that's what the first what you told me about why I made the bottom bracket, because I was tired of buying more crappy bottom brackets. So I made my own. But you started mountain biking like I was a pioneer. We were just making mountain bikes and trying to figure out what a mountain bike was supposed to be. When you came onto the scene, you showed us what a mountain bike shouldn't be and set about making all those wrongs right.

your influence took the raw spindly mountain bikes that we had come up with that were way better than what we had before and actually brought it into something that what we ride now something that doesn't break that you can enjoy and put in your garage and use every single day without taking a tool set. But I can see that the bones of that whole operation happened during that BMX period because you went through a

a short but fast evolution through BMX. Now tell us about the four mountain bikes that you destroyed before you decided this was gonna be the greatest sport in the world.

Yeah, we were, this was actually while I was still in Chicago and we were out at our dirt jumps and a kid came by on a black chrome Schwinn High Sierra and it was the first mountain bike I'd ever seen in person. And, uh, Oh dude, can we check that out? And I hit a couple of berms and punched this. We had this one jump that, uh, it was a double and, uh, there's pictures of one of my friends in the air over at Volkswagen with his, with his brother standing on the hood on the roof with his hands on the air. So

pretty good size jump. So I landed and the fork broke off and the head tube broke and handed this poor kid his brand new bike back, sorry dude. And that was mountain bike suck and that was that. And then came out here and I thought I had saved enough money for school and I was running out of money after about the first semester so went and got a job at the local bike shop and I was the BMX grom. Almost all these guys were.

were into mountain bikes. They were road racers coming into mountain bikes. And we carried Nishiki and Fat Chance and Richie. And I borrowed a demo, I forget which model, Nishiki. And I was hooked. And then I put my money down on an employee purchase on a Nishiki Pinnacle. Ooh, so what year was this? That was 87.

Ooh, okay. 1987. So I was still living in the dorms. Um, our dorm was interesting. It was the lowest priced of the dorms and it was definitely more like a crappy YMCA. And we, we all open shower heads and everything. And they, and so I would bring my bike in from a bike ride and me and my bike would take our shower and wash the bike and had done, I had only had the bike for three weeks and I, I mean, I took everything to buy this bike.

that I owned and had money-wise. And, um, and I'm washing it and there's a ripple underneath the down tube behind the head tube. Oops. Yeah. And so that bike, the group kit was great. And, uh, I think I had a constant employee purchase account going at the bike shop for as long as I worked there because I talked to them. They had fat chance and everybody that really rode had fat chance. And so, so you were like a coal miner.

Every penny that you made just went right back into the corporation. Yeah, if it didn't go to pay for school, it went for that. Yeah, I didn't really need to eat. But yeah, it was interesting because even back then, that's when U-brakes were coming along. And as a bike mechanic, I really fucking hated U-brakes. They were just horrible. And you know, chains suck and everything else that went along, that just amplified the problem.

And Fat Chance wanted to charge $175 more to order a frame with cantilever mounts on it. There's a lot of money back then. Yeah, I did it. That's how badly I did not want U brakes on my bike. So yeah, I custom ordered it, waited for it. It came back then actually in a reasonable timeframe. And

got that bike and that was my first real mountain bike. It was an amazing bike. When I met my wife Cindy and we were dating, I talked her into getting a fat chance and then I had a fat chance Yo Eddy it after that and by that time

I had already built the Talon alongside that and was starting to work on what became Titus. So basically, the disappointment, the initial disappointment faded. So you said after you had your first real mountain bike ride, you were hooked for life. Yeah. I think that was in the Pinkbike interview. And it's true. Because, but I mean, I thought knowing you all these years, you just have no room for disappointment.

wrecking the first three bicycles that you've tried, going on a mountain bike ride, coming back and having you say, this is for me. That's a huge commitment. You must have really liked it. So now you're running two bike shops. You're managing two bike shops. And this guy comes in and he's ranting and raving about some stupid article that said titanium is almost impossible to weld and blah, blah. And he's like, this is bullshit.

And that's kind of the beginning of the first chapter of you as a, as a real mountain bike builder. Am I getting that correct? Yeah, it was, uh, that was probably, I was, it was 89. Um, and, uh, yeah, his wife was shopping next door and he, he saw the bicycling magazine on the rack and, or bicycle guide or one of those magazines that existed back then. And, and, uh, he,

bought it and was checking it out while she was shopping. And there was an article on Merlin and the black art of titanium and everything. He just thought it was a bunch of smoke. And yeah, just brought this magazine in and he was talking about how easy it was to build, how easy titanium was to work with. And he worked in aerospace. And you know, I'm still now a cocky 21 year old. And...

Um, and I, that had built frames and parts and I was, and I was basically like, well, I know everything about bicycles. So, you know, if you know everything about titanium, you'll let's do something because I'm kind of in between my frame building gigs. And uh, so yeah, we started, he, he was, he was into it. He wasn't a cyclist at all and he was super into doing something. And we did in fact start building titanium parts and pieces in his garage.

And then that turned into frames. We built steel frames first. Does this mysterious person have a name? Mark Zepeda. Mark Zepeda? Yeah. And there is actually aerospace in Phoenix? Yeah, there's huge aerospace in Phoenix. General Dynamics is here. I mean, Apache Helicopters built here. Allied Signal Aerospace made Learjet engines, and he worked for the materials testing division of Allied Signal Aerospace.

So he was a welder in materials testing lab. And yeah, so he was interested in this and we struck up a partnership that eventually, very quickly actually became Titus. So how did you get the name Titus? It's a name he was passionate about. It refers to a book in the Bible. He was a pretty religious person and yeah, it stood for quality and...

and doing what you say you're going to do. And Titus Titanium had a nice ring. And originally,

we were Titus Titanium. We weren't Titus Cycles because we were only doing titanium products. So yeah, we ran with it. So let's look at the landscape of when you started Titus. Because starting Titus is like everything else was kind of like the drum roll. And starting Titus was like the first hit on the cymbal.

If let's look at the landscape, like at that time, the sport was still primarily cross country, but people were starting to what I call a destination cross country. Yeah. Where people wanted more rugged bikes because they're going to Moab. They're going to destinations. There was no I don't think there's any bike parks.

that were well known, even Whistler back then. No, Whistler back then, actually, bikes were not legal on the mountain. Yeah. And yeah, Moab was starting to happen. Yep. The kamikaze was happening. Yeah, there was but it was kind of destination. Yeah. You went to Mammoth and rode at Mammoth. You went to Moab and rode at Moab. And it was it was just a trail bike. Didn't have a name.

But mountain bikers were starting to deviate from cross-country racing, which was like the soul of the sport. Hardtails were still the number one thing. Suspension with, uh, when did rock shocks come out? 89 or 88? Oh, I think it was 88. Yeah. 88, 89. So this would be about the time when the first like, Manitou and rock shock suspensions were out and the hardtail was kind of like. That thing. And then Titus came out.

And did you start making bicycles? I mean, you're making stems, right? Bar ends and stems. Bar ends and stems and bar stem combos and some seat post stuff we were playing with. And then, yeah, but really quickly into all of that, we built our first steel frame and as kind of a prototype of this is what we want. I love my fat chance, Yo Eddie. And there was a group of us that managed this chain of bike stores and we were all...

into high end stuff. So I had a buddy who had a richie P 21, Philip raised bike and another friend that all he rode was Bontrager's And then I had the fat chances and dabbled in. I had one of the first yetis that had a Fisher oversized head tube on it. And, uh, and that's actually the, I, in that 1988 period, I put a rock shocks on it because I folded that, uh,

Accu Tracks or it was actually just a Yeti Cycles fork on the first ride. I and it just buckled underneath the cantilever studs and oh, three, five wall. Oh, yeah, I think it was. It was this is unreal how bad how thin that tubing was and how quickly it folded. And John Parker at the time, he would they were small enough. He would be the one answering the phone, telling me I'm an idiot and didn't know how to ride. And every one of them broke. And that really put Bontrager on the map for

quality forks. Cause I did have a Bontrager fork on it as its replacement briefly. That was a good fork. Yeah, that was a fantastic fork. And then the first RockShox. And so yeah, it was that. And then just being able to ride all those bikes, there was kind of a philosophy when you looked at, when I looked at all of them from my side was,

whether it be a Bontrager, which had pretty short top tubes and pretty long chainstays. And the Richie was a little bit different, but like all the best handling bikes, they all handled good. They just were different in how you fit up on them. And they all had 41 and a half inch wheel bases on a medium frame. So that number was just in my head that whatever bike we built had to have a 41 and a half inch wheel base. And

I always wanted a little bit more stretch out of the front of my Fat Chance and there were some bikes I had ridden with shorter chainstays and I liked how easy they wheelied. So our first Titus titanium frame was a quarter inch taken off the chainstays and added to the top tube to get my 41 inch, 41 and a half inch wheelbase to, but still match my Fat Chance perfectly. The other thing too is another buddy had.

one of the first Merlin mountain bikes, it was like number nine was the serial number. And it was light, but the thing was super flexy and it wasn't straight. And so when we, so that, that was, it was brand new product when, when Mark came walking into the bike shop with that magazine. And fortunately I had a chance to ride it. And when he started talking about titanium, I did think it was a black art and it was for the bike industry. It was such a

Such a cool thing. I mean, there was no Lightspeed quite yet. There was no Dean, all the companies that, McMahon, all those early titanium companies, we kind of all launched at about the same time, seemingly. But the big thing was I wanted to build basically something that rode as well as my Yo Eddy, but weighed like the Merlin, well, it wasn't flexy like the Merlin. And so the finding big titanium tubes and

At the time big was 1.5 inch compared to the like inch and an eighth that Merlin top tubes and down tubes were made out of actually that was a difficult deal but the first frame was heavy for a titanium frame but it really rode just like my fat chance. Well you've been a stickler for stiff you know for stiff frames from the beginning. Yeah not like aluminum beat the crap out of you stiff but yeah you don't want things.

chains falling off and tires rubbing and that sort of thing. So now you started Titus. Now, when did you start building Titus frames? Because you were just doing stems and stuff, bars and stems, which were big sellers. This is the beginning of the beginning of the- We were just playing around. Yeah, I mean, they weren't big sellers. They were big sellers later when Titus existed, but-

In the garage, they were the experiments of, can we build titanium bike parts and things? But it was probably within the same three month period that we built the first steel frame and I got to ride it around a little bit, but I didn't have any money. So I sold it to a friend. And then the first titanium frame also rode it just to know that I was successful in what I wanted to achieve, but I had to sell it. You're not the only one.

I would hold onto a bike for about three or four months before I sold my mantas when I was first starting out so I could sell it and pay rent and buy more tubing to fill orders. It's not an easy business to make money at, which brings me to the next one. Your first production frame wasn't even your brand. It wasn't even a Titus. No. So when we did start building some frames...

I was at a bike race with one of my bikes and I met John Rader, who was the person who invented the threadless headset. He was a big deal at the time. Within one year, I think something like more than 80% of the bikes on the showroom floor went from a goose neck to a threadless headset. He had sold that patent to what's now Cane Creek back then was Diacomp

Having that kind of success in the bike industry for somebody that's completely outside of the bike industry, that's just an enthusiast with an idea. Uh, he had a great amount of pull and he had an idea for a suspension bike. And he had tried working with Texas A&M, I believe to, to have them build prototypes and it didn't really go anywhere. And so he asked if I'd be interested in doing these prototypes and we built the prototypes and he went shopping to.

GT and Univega and Univega bought the bike. So I didn't think anything would come of it from my side. I just built the prototypes and it was going on and finishing school and got a purchase order from Univega for 175 titanium full suspension frames. We weren't in a shop, we weren't really a going concern. I had a drill press where we had to, I'd cope the tubes with, it was a...

Craftsman drill press and had to put a about two size smaller a cutter than what the cope would actually be Is the things shook so bad? And it took so long to make the cope That by the time it finished wallowing itself out you'd have about the right size cut on the tube, so it was a completely different scene on what we had to use to build the bikes from going to that to like Should I even accept this and

I think I've talked about this before and other articles and podcasts and things, but I had switched from engineering to accounting and I was interviewing with accounting firms. I was, I was my senior year in school. And so it was, do I build bikes or

Do I push a pen? So you were in a suit looking for jobs? Did you wear ties and stuff? I had one suit, yeah. My parents helped me buy a suit so that I could interview. I have never seen you in anything but a t-shirt or a jacket. I have not owned a suit in probably 15 years, maybe longer. So how did you say you were? I think I wore a suit when I got married. I've been married for 30 years. That's.

That would be me too. So for most people, 175 bikes does sound like a lot, but if you're a frame builder, even a really good one, well-known blah blah, if you're not a liar and you said you made 175 frames in one year, you would be like at the scale of Tom Richie. Tom Richie was one of the most prolific frame builders I've ever met.

And he fudged a little bit when he talked about his numbers in the early days as well. I won't tell you by how much, but 175, that's no small deal. So how in the hell does somebody that's still in college, that's working out of a friend's garage that has a name and no money make 175? I mean, how did you organize that? Well, I had a professor.

That was my thesis professor, and he was head of the accounting department. And I told him about this, he was a cyclist, and I told him about this opportunity and what was going on and didn't really know what to do. And he said, you can always be an accountant. And he was writing a new textbook and offered to give me $15,000, the first proceeds from that book, to help get this going. And then Mark.

His boss at the aerospace company, Larry Richmond, who's still part of Pivot Today, he was interested in funding that from Mark's side as well. So he put $15,000 in and I hadn't graduated yet, but it was enough for us to be able to lease a little, I don't know, 900,000 square foot bay.

in an industrial park up the street from Arizona State University and then Mark had welders that were titanium welders that weren't in his testing lab that were swing shift production welders at Allied Signal and they were always happy to make an extra buck. So we bought a manual mill, we bought a manual lathe. Larry was really good at designing fixtures. And

I learned a lot about how you hold titanium and order of operations and basically how to weld things from those aerospace guys. We had a swing shift welder and yeah, we kicked it off with a bang and got those bikes done. If somebody gave me $30,000 when I was at the peak of my Mantis production, I would have been scared that I wouldn't have been able to pay it back.

I'd be worried every minute while I was making those bicycles. Did you go free and clear? You got the money and paid it back? How'd that work out? You know, Hal did not want a loan. He wanted to give me the money and I did not want to just take the money. And, and even when we started building bikes on a more production basis, um, he bought, he was a road rider and he bought several custom road bikes from us over the years, but he would never let me give him.

a bike. And then when Titus ended, and we started pivot, I actually gave him stock in pivot from the beginning because he just kind of wanted to make it right. He's no longer with us. And since then, his wife is no longer with us. So his wife's brothers and sisters

He's, he was, I wouldn't be where I am today without his investment and belief in what I'm doing here. That's pretty spectacular. I've did a little research behind your back and I think you're probably one of the most honest businessmen I've ever met in the bicycle industry. I mean, if you tipped.

The entire bicycle industry outside and gave it a light tap. Millions of flakes would drift off into nowhere. It's just not an easy business to make money at. And there's even people with goodwill have been forced into situations where they've had to abandon their, you know, the trusted investors and stuff. And one of the one of the things that you've carried forward is you say what you're going to do.

do what you're gonna say and pay your bills. And I've been in tight situations and as a businessman that tried to get started and made a living making bikes and I know that's not an easy road. So I'd say, that's probably one of the reasons that our friendship has gone so long because most of the people that I hold close to me and that's just a handful are honest and trustworthy. And that's one of the reasons that I think

I've just treasured your friendship all this time is because you keep your secrets and you say what you're going to do and do what you're going to say. And that's to me is one of the core values that all humans should have. And I aspire to have not quite come close to your level. Well, thank you. I try my best. So now you've got you delivered those bikes.

Did you get another order? How did Titus get started making bikes after that? Did you just... Well, we were making Titus bikes. We weren't marketing Titus bikes, but we delivered those bikes to Univega. Univega had a lot of other things going on in that they kind of wanted to be a high-end brand and compete against Specialized at the time, who was really pushing the innovate or die slogan.

And GT was coming along and there was a lot of things happening and putting paint jobs on open mold frames from Asia wasn't a long term plan for success. And so, Univig had made a minor effort at that, but they didn't really have the engineering, the backing, the things they needed behind them. So, yeah, that was kind of a one and done project. But by that time...

We were making our own frames. We, during that time, the product manager at Univega that I was working with got fed up with Univega and left and became production manager at AMP research. And he invited me to come over there and see them. And I got to meet Horst Leitner and...

basically learn about the Horst link and take a rear triangle back with me. And so we built our first Titus full suspension in 1990 with an amp research rear triangle. And when you mentioned Moab and destination stuff, people say we go there and they're like, do you remember when we used to ride this on a hard tail? And I say, no, I took my first prototype suspension bike here. So I've never ridden Moab on a hard tail.

And I that experience and then where it went from there I was Pretty early proponent of suspension bikes. Well, the Univega was a suspension bike bit of a nightmare I think it had a torsion a second bottom bracket size torsion device in there that had rubber in it and Yeah, it looked like a side view when you took the caps off. It looked like a revolver Yeah, it just if you're gonna be given a first project

And you actually had to make that work, right? Because it was just a design when you got it. It was an idea. A rough idea. And yeah, we had to do a lot to get it to function correctly. It was called Shock Block?

Yes, it was called the Univega Shock Block something or other. Had a number behind it. Google that and look at the Shock Block and say, oh, I can make that work. It was two suspension systems.

on the same rear end and everything had to be right for it to do anything at all. And it actually had some lifespan to it. A little bit. Back then, RockShox was actually being made at Diacomp, Cane Creek, USA. So back now where all the Cane Creek suspension is being made, that was...

That production line today is the same production line that the RS1 was made on. And because John had sold that patent to them, we had access to the cutting edge suspension technology of the time. The ball bearing? Yes, you filled up your fork or your rear shock in this case with a basketball pump needle.

But it was basically a mini RS1, had a little rebound damper knob on the end of it. And in many ways, it was the first trunnion shock because it mounted on the side of the body. And but yeah, you would preload the torsion. So that provided 85, 90 percent of the spring weight and then basically be running like 75 PSI in this rear shock to kind of finish it off and give you a little damping. Idea was cool.

really hard to set up for the end consumer. And I mean, it was a super high pivot bike too. So the challenges that come with that and the drive trains and derailers ability to handle all of that back then was, none of it really worked well together. It looked cool though. I'll admit it looked cool. I actually Googled it myself and I remember, oh, I know that bike and now I know who made it. But anyway, back to this. So now Titus is making

Suspension bikes. Horst, I'm a reasonably good friend with Horst. I mean, I've known him since he started making the bikes as well. He's a brilliant man, but his philosophy is you make it so light that it breaks and then you fix what broke. And that's the best way to arrive at the lightest possible structure. And that's what his bikes were. And unfortunately, if you were a heavy person, you kind of blew the hole.

equation because they were quite flexible at the time I think I weighed 145 so I was the perfect person for Horst bikes his apps were not too flexible for me but for you I imagine that was a different story yeah my lightest fighting weight what I think was about 180 so I understand you had a little argument with those guys well I brought it back it was flex he didn't like some

Designed some fixtures to it wasn't entirely straight designed our own like weld fixtures for it added some bosses so we could put a stiffening brace on the back end and brought the fixtures back to Horst to so that we could buy rear triangles and they could said we're not trying to build 500 bikes were building 5,000 bikes and

Yeah, the guy that left Univega, his name was also Richard. And he kind of separated us and a Horst, Horst daughter as well, I think got a little bit involved. We got it all worked out. And they built rear triangles for us for a couple of years because at that time we just did titanium and steel. And that was another thing, welding aluminum and heat treating aluminum. And that was a learning curve that we.

we had yet to experience. And so that was kind of the next stage. So now, so Titus's first frames were dual suspension then? No, the first frames were hardtails and then we added that one pretty quickly. Okay, because at that time, I think titanium hardtails were like the thing to have. Now, if your hair is gray, then your metal is probably gray. It's just, it's a niche market.

for people that have been in the sport for a long time and don't want a dual suspension bike or a dual suspension bike with lots of travel. I don't like bikes with too much, too many muscles. But back then, I think titanium bike was, titanium hardtail was just, you know, on the altar. It was, ah! So you started, were your bikes the most expensive you could buy? Were they the same price as Merlin's?

They were the they were actually a little bit better priced than Merlin's who our goal and the way we designed our Flexible manufacturing was to be able to build fully custom bikes At at the volume and price of what light speed was building bikes at so we competed well at those price points, but Just our volumes were super small and we didn't have a line of at that point yet of standard sized bikes

Everything was custom. So there would be a fit sheet a CAD drawing every frame that went into the shop whether it be a suspension bike or a hardtail was 100% built for you So when was the moment that you were you know, you're working at Titus? I imagine in my mind you were because you're so anal retentive when it comes to stuff. You're probably

involved at every step from materials coming in to sales going out just to make sure it was right. I mean there was like five of us so yeah I was involved in everything. So what point do you think you could call it a bicycle company, a manufacturer, even a small manufacturing company? When did you arrive at that point? Probably 92, 93. I mean by 93 that's when I got married and

I wasn't taking home a paycheck. I was still managing the weekend manager at the bike shops and going at nights to build bikes per piecework to try and make enough money to keep the lights on. But as far as starting to get known, building stuff not just for Titus, but doing OEM work for other manufacturers, probably about 1993. That's when I started Mountain Bike Action, when I sold Mantis.

and started working at Mountain Bike Action, I think it was, 93, 94. And one of the reasons I sold Mantis was because I didn't think, yeah, I was at that point, I had five employees, including myself, and I didn't think I could run a business without being able, and be creative at the same time, because I wasn't a good businessman.

but I knew how to make bikes. And my wife at the time was doing the import export. By that time we were doing import exports to Europe and Japan. And it was going pretty well. We had line of credit, where they had your credit card and you said, hey, you can spend $85,000 on this credit card. And you look at your, how many bicycles you're cranking out and you're going.

$85,000. Shall we just roll the dice? So it was dicey, but we were doing it. That's when I could say everything was going really well. And I was designing bicycles around for Nishiki and Raleigh. I was doing custom racing bicycles under different brands for people's racing programs. But I could see it in the future. And I thought that

specialized in those people when they stopped pretending that they were custom bike people, you know, they were all trying to sell the high end, you know, they would start making the custom hardware, you know, this at ordering the special bearings, the things that a small company, it was out of our reach, because we didn't have the scale. And I envisioned me scrambling to organize all these puzzle pieces that were in the air, and losing track of the creative, you know, the

the riding part and understanding the sport. And I thought this is probably a good time to jump ship. And Zapata Espinosa got an offer he couldn't refuse from Bicycling Magazine. Because Rodale, I'll say this because it's true, Rodale has just sucked when it came to the mountain bike. First they tried to name the sport. You know, they were like the sweater over the collar management.

And they just didn't get mountain biking. And they tried to get in from the outside, from the top down, and they just failed over and over again. So they hired Zap, because Zap was authentic, and still is to this day, to save their, to build a mountain bike magazine around them. And that left a vacuum. And they asked me if I could come up with three or four people that might be a candidate to take his place. And my wife at the time says, you know, you've been.

Circle in the drain on selling Mantis. Why don't you just do that? It's totally different. And I thought, what the hell? So here we are, you know, I'm no longer a bike guy. I'm no longer a bike guy and Titus is now a functioning business. Have we start there? You know, so now I'm riding your bikes. Yeah. I'm getting paid to ride your bikes. That was a tough job. Tell lies and ride bikes.

That's what a journalist does in that business, but not really lies. So anyway, so now, what was your product line? At that particular point, what did your product line look like, where you just do frames?

We're on the road bike, the full custom racer, FCR. Really innovative names, by the way. We had the SFS, the standard full suspension. This is the accountant speaking. Yeah. And

Yeah, nobody accused me of being a brilliant marketer. And then, yeah, and then we had a full custom racer road frame. So we had three, three products. And later on, when we started making our, our own rear triangles, we had a model called the Cyborg that was an interrupted seat tube version of the struck bike. So it was just a shorter rear end with the shock underneath the seat tower. And those were.

That was the first products. So the RacerX, is that the first big hit that you made? Yeah, well, the SFS became renamed as the RacerX once we started making our own rear triangles. And so a lot of times, people will see the old AMP research rear-ended bikes with the brace on them and refer to that as a RacerX. But it was actually when we started.

doing all of our own aluminum work. And at that time, we also started selling those rear triangles to other companies as well. So just like AMP was doing, they were doing less of that. And so we started doing a lot more of that. Well, if I can remember right, when your rear triangles were pretty highly engineered, I think you were using rectangular tubing by then? The first ones were oval, but they were, everything was bigger, a lot bigger than what was going on the AMP research.

And when did the swing link, that little, when you added the swing link to the McPherson strut style? Yeah, that was the second generation of the RacerX. We realized we couldn't lean the strut over anymore and we wanted more travel out of that design. And we were already doing bikes like the Quasimodo that were linkage bikes. And so getting more stiffness and being able to take some load off those shocks. Fox at that time,

just starting to get, they weren't as happy doing all these custom eyelets and everything for the struts and basically trying to get it to where we could do eyelets on both ends of the shock. But the first ones with the guide were still basically guided strut bikes because the shock was still rigidly mounted to those. Yeah, that's how I started out. That for most, for people that are listening,

The McPherson's strut was exactly what's on the side of most cars. It's basically a wishbone and the shock is actually a sliding member of the wishbone. It doesn't have an eyelet on both sides. And the suspension guys hated that because they were all coming from the motorcycle world where the shock had to be completely isolated from any lateral stress or movement so that it was just being compressed as if it was a free body in space.

And if you asked them to make it any stronger, they would just say, no, we can't do that. Shocks don't work that way. So it was a difficult road to perfect. And what Chris did basically was put a small linkage in there to carry all the lateral loads, which allowed you to run an eyelet on both sides and to make the shock guys really happy. And from then on, that was the prototype of almost every suspension system we use. So the McPherson strut died a happy death.

Yep. And everybody else that was running the Horst link suspension was using some sort of linkage after that point specialized even Horst All of his B4s and B5s had the had a link in them. Yeah, an intense was coming along during that time and they had They they had all their four bar stuff with a lot of holes a lot of positions to mount your shock to the point that it wasn't

like

Was there a good position? Carpiel. Yeah. There's everything had an adjustment on a Carpiel, so he didn't have any responsibility for making the system work. Just all on you. And we were all trying to figure it out too a little bit. So finding stuff that worked and trying to get to the point where if you gave multiple positions to mount the shock, they better all be worth it. Like they're

There should be some redeeming value of every position and not one that completely jacks the bike. Well, both of us race motorcycles or road motorcycles at different times. And I think Jody Weisel, the editor of Motocross Action, in his voice, I'll say it, yeah, they come with 35 adjustments, but only one is right. And it's true. That was true. That was certainly true back then. Yeah, the motorcycles, no matter how many adjustments you put on them, there was just three clicks.

that were right on everything. So it was easy.

Let's go back to the Racer X, because I was a proponent of dual suspension trail bikes from the beginning. In fact, I had a pretty popular one with the MaxFront on it. And they all worked really well, as long as they had about 50 millimeters of rear wheel travel. It felt a lot like a hardtail, because when you're really pushing them out of the saddle, even though...

minimal travel forks back then, the Rockshark RS1, I think it had what, 40, 45 millimeters of travel or something like that. So when you leaned over the front with those 130 millimeter stems we had, there was only a half an inch of travel. So it wasn't like the things were pogoing up and down. You just basically mashed the suspension down to its maximum stiffness and accelerated out of the corners. And that's how most of the early dual suspension.

popular dual suspension bikes were and the racer X was similar to that. It was like super fast to ride as a suspension bike at a time when most people thought hardtails were the gold standard for efficiency. It didn't feel much difference. It was a stiff, fast, just easy to ride bike. But later on you came out with, was the Quasi-Mos, what was your downhill bike? Yep. That was a interrupted seat tube. That means that

It had a subframe on it. And we didn't have dropper posts back then. So we didn't need a long seat tube. But anyway, it was a radical bike for the time. Cause that's when you look at a bike and you say, where do all the hard points have to be on a dual suspension bike? And they're not, they don't line up with a standard dual double diamond frame. Like the racer X and most of the early designs were look like a regular double diamond bicycle frame. With.

hinges on them. And that was easy to digest for people that didn't think suspension was ever going to sell or were riding their first suspension bike. But there's the Quasi-Moto that just looked like a modern downhill bike with a steep head angle. And a high bottom rack is because we thought everybody rode on the South Mountain. There was big rocks and boulders everywhere. But it turns out that most of the bike parks these days don't have any rocks in them except for where they place them.

So they could have zero clearance bottom brackets. But back to this, when you came out with a Quasi-Moto, you came out with a couple of bikes that had long travel. By long, I'm saying four inches. Yeah, so the Moto Lite was actually 125 millimeter travel. That's just outrageous for the time. Yeah, so it was either four and a half or five inches. And that one, that was cool because it was lighter. It wasn't a bolt-on seat tower.

Uh, we, we didn't really, I think, I think Intense was starting and Fos was really the only one who had hydroforming. Oh, and mountain cycle had hydroforming down to some extent. And we, we didn't know that technology yet here. So, and, and there was no cat. So literally we were blacksmithing this seat tower and then getting it all built on the bike.

built a couple prototypes, blacksmithing some more, and then having to hammer it back out flat to see what we had done and how we had arrived here, and now how are we gonna build this thing in steps? And that's actually how I met Bill Kibler, our current R&D production manager. He was working at a high-end ATV race shop that had a bunch of press brakes and everything, and he figured out how to make that part. Anybody who doesn't know Bill.

Bill is the CNC God that has been with Chris for how many years now? Uh, well, that was 97, 98 where I met him and started working with him on a project. And then in his, and then he pursued us as far as, uh, when he owned a, his own machine shop of can we do work for Titus? Uh, and so yeah, he's, he's been.

I've known him since, I don't know, mid 90s. And yeah, we worked together for a long time. So when you sent me, I think, what was the model that you sent Mountain Bike Action, a long travel one? I think it was the Moto Lite. Yeah. The original one. Yes. And then later on you sent successive ones. Yeah, you know, as I warmed up to what I thought long travel.

Suspension was he's yeah, the original motor like did well But the second generation was more of a double dot it double diamond triangle looked like the racer acts but with a Functional full linkage on it, but they were both I don't think that bike ever got over five inches of travel was always between four and a half Five with two travel settings on the linkage that seems to be a sweet spot even today. It is I mean, it's four inches of travel

five inches of travel somewhere around there anymore. And it seems to complicate the design, like it adds weight to the design to increase the travel, because you have clearances and longer levers and stuff. But the magic for performance, lightweight and versatility seems to be somewhere between four and five inches. Yeah, that's kind of a great all around.

Well, now cross country race. Yeah. I remember. 100 millimeters for cross country, you would have ever guessed. But I mean, back then, you were breaking some serious ground, because there wasn't much. I think there was a Fox ALS. Was that? It was Fox. Well, the Fox ALPS. ALPS, ALPS. That was it. That was a, I mean, that one wasn't the greatest damper in the world. I think for the top of the downhills.

It was a shock at the bottom of the downhills. It was a shock like mechanism. And that was one of the best lightweight dampers you could buy at the time. Yeah. And it was even compared to the size of today's shocks. It was the diameter of the body and the ceiling section was relatively huge. Yeah. So when you're talking about a strut bike that's running really low leverage ratio, really low pressures, there's monster sealstiction. It was, you know,

you got efficiency because of seal stiction and because that suspension wasn't moving till you hit something. And yeah, the switch from trying that first ampere end with an amp coil, which was also an interesting shock. It was not the best of suspension components to that Alps being a real damped first air shock.

But no negative pressure chambers, no negative springs. All that pressure shoved against a huge seal. And even greases, oils, all the things that, none of this stuff existed. There was no Kashima coating yet. What was the first, it was the first pedal friendly shock because as long as you pedal lightly, it refused to move until you overcame the sealstiction. So it was ahead of its time in the worst possible way.

But yeah, you're right. There was no negative spring in it. So whatever you pressurized the shock at was what the ending pressure was. It wasn't like sticking a coil on a table. A coil spring goes to zero at the end of its spring rate. But an air shock goes to whatever you set it at. And I think it was at a time when everybody was worried about flats, 45 PSI in your tires was common for some of the cross-country guys.

45 to 50 PSI. Yeah, to keep them in flux. And then they were putting as much pressure as they could possibly stick in the shock, so it didn't work unless they hit something really big. So the potential for the best suspension design in the world to not work was really high at that time. But you are actually, I think, as far as your long travel bikes at the time, I'm not sure what year that was, but I remember that...

It was the first crack at an enduro bike before anybody was even thinking of what enduro would be a truly long travel bike that was light enough that you could take into the back country and really do some, some crazy stuff. And it was right outside of my understanding when I first started riding those bikes, like, what am I going to do with that? But I lived in an area where we rode on flat fire roads, the top of the hills, and then we bombed down.

trails and technical stuff on the other side. When I came out to ride with you, it all kind of fit in place because South Mountain is like, the uphills are technical. I mean, you need suspension to really enjoy the trails in your backyard. And you know, you schooled me a dozen times before I got it. I'm like, oh, okay. You know, you need to some space between your tires and your butt.

in order to negotiate this for any length of time. And then it all clicked, I'm like, oh yeah. And it is a little bit different here, but we'd always also go to Moab too, and that was our favorite destination, and how many times could you ride Porcupine Rim in a week? And having a five inch travel bike was really key to that success. And then also, as things progressed,

You're going faster in big roots in Pennsylvania. And some of the things that we developed here turns out worked well in a lot of different places. And then our riding styles shifted as well. That's true. There is a suspension learning curve. You have to change your pedal circle a little bit, make a little, a bunch of adjustments to make a dual suspension bike as efficient as it could be. Now we take it for granted. Everybody that buys a bike, unless they're really into a rigid bike.

almost everybody buys a dual suspension bike and learns on it. There's no idea of what it could have been before. Most of the people who grow up with the technology and as, as you would learn later, you know, with when you hooked up with the DW link and as, as a suspension kinematics became the word of the day, um, we started relying less on shocks that don't work to make the bikes feel better.

Yeah. And geometry that did work in kinematics. And that really pushed it over the top. And that's I think you were at the forefront of dual suspension before that happened. So you were one of the first people to realize. The true value of that technology, because you had been working on it. I think you brought the Horst like as far as it can go. I've got a Horst like bike now from Germany. And I remember that.

they have in the later versions of the Titus's that I rode, they have a similar feel. It's just that beautiful performance in the mid stroke, you know? Yeah. It was just, it can't be beat. It's just you sacrifice something on the top and something on the bottom, but that mid stroke performance in those bikes was just wonderful. And yeah, when I look at the, other than the fact that we've got the wrong size wheels and ran stems that were way too long, so geometry is completely

If you took the linkage off the original moto light or Quasimodo and plopped them on a modern bike, as far as the suspension curves and rates, there wouldn't be much to change. What was right back then is still right today. That's true. If you look where the virtual pivot locations are and everything, it's kind of like what was right.

brought one of the first rear suspension bikes in. He was a car racer. And he knew about all the different acceleration angles and stuff from racing modified stock cars up in the Northeast. And so his little single pivot bike with a location right above the middle chainring that he patented for that specific reason.

If you look at all the virtual pivot points and stuff today that are the most accepted, they all hover around Bob Gervin's fixed pivot. And it's like, you know, here's a guy who came out of cars, didn't know shit about bikes. And he said, this is where it has to be. And you're like, it took us 22 years to agree with him. Yeah, it took a while to get the pivots up to that.

key locations and even back then there was a lot of single high pivots but they were really high pivots. Yeah they had to be in the right spot. He called me one time and asked me about that. How did you get to that spot? I said I don't know maybe I cleared the front derailleur mount pretty much. Yeah okay so let's get back to something that is one of my favorite subjects and that is how the hell did a guy...

who rides motorcycles, who's totally into dual suspension, heavy duty, one of the best technical riders I know. How did you fall in love with road bikes so much and hardtails that you could come up with that, the most expensive frame to build in the world? And I'm talking about the ExoGrid system. How that, so basically the ExoGrid system is you take a beautiful titanium frame and I think this Titus was the only.

company I've ever seen use this technology. Then you mold, first you laser cut a pattern out of the tube. Then you use that pattern to capture a molded carbon fiber liner inside the titanium tube. And then you leave the ends just long enough so that you can, I'm pretty sure you guys use heat sinks because there's no other way. You put a heat sink on the thing and then weld it, TIG weld it.

in the same way you'd take a standard titanium frame. And I rode those bikes and they had a distinct feel. They were just beautiful, hardtails, you know? But they had a distinct feel that, you know, you think you're imagining, but when you ride another bike, another titanium bike or steel or aluminum or whatever, it just doesn't feel that way. But I think you even admitted that there's probably no.

more expensive way to build a frame. How did you end up at that, towards the end of the Titus era, making a bike like that? Well, when things were, we were seeing things go towards carbon fiber and just kind of like before I knew about brazing or before I knew about titanium or aluminum, we just got to find a way to learn this technology and the opportunity came to

merged Titus with Viatech, which was a composites technology company. And so my goal at the time was that this would be good for us. It would be a good venture and we would gain all this aerospace technology that nobody else had. That turned out to be not quite right, but that's not how it how it baked out. But the idea was to get that carbon fiber composite knowledge.

They came to the table, one of the patents they held was something called IsoGrid. And it was basically a normal carbon tube, but you could make the tube thinner and then there would be a reinforcement structure inside of basically a weave of Kevlar strips inside that would reinforce this really thin wall tube from buckling. They actually didn't have as much of a good application in the...

bike business, like if you were racing America's Cup and you had mast poles the size of, you know, that were three feet wide, that's where that technology really would benefit most when you brought it down to a bike tube size. It didn't have as much benefit, but we were still making these carbon fiber tubes really thin, certainly too thin for mountain biking.

This is where I met Kevin. He came in as a composites consultant to help us with some things, because we actually didn't get a lot of technology transfer over from Viatech, and had to learn a lot of stuff on our own. And Kevin, who's a founder of Pivot and has been with me since the early days of that Viatech-Titus partnership, he had owned a snowboard company, was involved in composites.

and came in as a consultant. And we developed all these different layups of isogrid tubes, and I would build road bike frames with just different layup down tubes. And so we do on the computer what it would tell us as far as changing bending stiffness and torsional stiffness, and then we'd build another tube and then we'd build another lugged bike with it. And so it was easiest to do it on the road bike. You could really see what was going on. You could feel the bottom bracket stiffness change or the chatter through the handlebars.

and so we really started to get a good feel for okay if I change this layup this material and The computer says it does this is what it means in the real world and so I think I probably had five or six frames that were identical except for layup changes on these bikes and the rest of them were primarily titanium and then I Was riding down South Mountain on the road and

I got a little wiggle and I looked down at the top tube and the carbon fiber in the lug where the paint was and stuff, it started gaffing on me. I just heard a little pop over an expansion joint and got on the brakes. The front end of the bike did not come off, but it scared the piss out of me. I was like, Kevin, the whole thing about how we have to prep the titanium and we're molding these things blind.

And we're totally relying on this glue. And did we prep the titanium perfect too much heat get into the bond area? We could have a problem here. And at the time I still, we were doing it and I still did not trust composites. I was still a metal guy. And so I was like, I don't feel even comfortable riding bikes like where this could happen. And.

And I said, you know, what about if we had a mechanical lock? We could make the lugs look like a Colnago and cut some diamonds in it and then the mold of carbon so it pushed up through those holes. And then even if, yeah, a bond might break, but that tube's not coming apart. And so we did that and it was successful.

But then rocks hitting the carbon fiber tube on the bottom of a racer ax. We were at the time using a inch and three quarter down tube. And when you got to inch and three quarter titanium, that was a rolled and seemed tube. So wall thickness was a little heavier. It was quite the baseball bat. And so now you're taking a titanium frame and making it quite a bit heavier.

and you're gaining stiffness that you need, but you're gaining it in all directions. So some of the ride quality that you had out of titanium is now gone. And so then I was like, well, what if we did this whole thing in diamonds and just gutted it? And so we still rocks hitting it and stuff, we'd have titanium and titanium still bends nice. And then you don't have to worry about the carbon fiber and doing the layup so that we're getting strengths from the carbon fiber. We really can just tune.

with the carbon fiber. And so by the time we were done, we had tube sets that had bending stiffness that were more compliant than titanium, but torsional bottom bracket had tube stiffness that were way higher than aluminum bikes at the time. And so you could really build a really kick ass chassis out of it, but it was, it was a labor intensive process. That tube would get laser cutting in an oxygen free atmosphere.

have all kinds of slag inside, then it would go to an aerospace deburr shop. Rows of people with little dental grinders, cleaning up all the edges of every tee, every logo, every diamond, and there's hundreds of diamonds. And then it would have like a flapper wheel deburring on the inside to get the surface finish perfect for molding carbon fiber inside. And then we...

basically lay up the carbon fiber tubes on a mandrel as we do today, slip it inside, and it would fill the area, and then we would stack 10 to 15 stacks of diamonds and Titus logos and carbon fiber in those open holes. Sounds like a nightmare. And then we'd put it in the mold.

do the deal, come out with a tube. But those tubes, because they were, because they were not, they were seamed tubes, not drawn tubes, they weren't super round to begin with. So now all the resin, I mean, you couldn't look at it and see it wasn't round, but if you tried to spin it on the lathe, the things poppin' all over the place. So you can't really clean it up easy. So then we had to have all these tubes centerless grind.

So a down tube on a racer X before we coped it, welded it, did anything at the time was around $450 is what I had into it. Oh my God. And weeks of process to get it to that point. So yeah, somehow or another we made money off these bikes and it was a good cool thing and we learned a ton and they do look beautiful. But

The juice isn't always worth the squeeze. Yes. To me, that sounds like the diversion. You could have probably reinvented the entire dual suspension bike in the amount of time it took to figure out the process. They're beautiful. I mean, there's probably racer x's and road bikes that you've made that are hanging in museums now that people just want to pet because they're that beautiful. And we still see it.

We built a surprising number of those bikes, a surprising number of people bit the bullet and spent the money and they were all custom. Um, and we see them at Nika races. They're, they're out there and they're running and they will probably never break. You think your bottom brackets are still around somewhere? I don't think anybody be running two degree taper spindles anymore. That would be, there's probably a couple out there, but I, I think that one went on a long time ago.

Okay, so that was a diversion, but I wanted to hear that story because every time I saw those things, I thought, these are so beautiful, but why would anybody want to put that much money into a bike frame, you know? And just to have the same similar bike frame. They rode beautifully, but every time I saw them as a builder, you know, somebody that builds things, I just thought, can you make it harder on yourself?

Yeah, you can just imagine Kevin and I doing the first ones and after we get the laser all cut out and get this Piece of crap to back. We're sitting back there with a little pencil grinders sweating and just like Hours to make the first tube to see if this evens gonna be a thing and then having to figure out a process where we could actually make batches of tubes and get all the vendors lined up and Find people that could get us

past the next challenge on that. And we had it home and it was great. Well, Kevin, talking about Kevin, so you met Bill, Kevin, I mean, you assembled a group of people when you were with Titus. Yeah. Many of them, investors and designers and stuff, still are with you today, or would be with you if they were still alive. When was the point at Titus?

And you're a hands-on guy. You're like type A. Everything has to be right. You're the personality that would over-manage if in my imagination would over-manage everything. But you don't. In my experience, the people that work for you and your vendors and stuff, I mean, you push them really hard, but you allow them to do their job and kind of hands off once you get into agreement. They're

free to do what they do. I mean, Kevin works remotely and he's been with you for how many years? Well since the beginning of Pivot and five years before that. And Bill, how long has he been with you? Again, he sold his machine shop. Actually us being together in the same company was the beginning of Pivot, but he was a very close vendor and became our primary vendor for all.

machine parts and aluminum parts probably six years before we started Pivot as well. Yeah. He dates back pretty far. So what was the point where you either were forced to or chose to? Because I mean, when you were when you were at Titus, you also started off, you started sending your print some of your excess production out, farming that out.

So that's, I mean, basically, I think you ended up in Taiwan while you were at Titus. Started first in using USA vendors, something that didn't work out too well for me. I went through a few until I found some people that were really solid, but then you went to Asia and I was designing and managing products in Asia in Alouette to 93.

And that's a different world. So how did you, you can't possibly manage Titus at home and be in Taiwan and running that. So how did you make the transition? Because for somebody like you to be in Taiwan and be absolutely happy that your business is running perfect here, you'd have to entrust it to some pretty good people. Yeah, I mean, by that time at Titus.

I mean, originally I was the production manager. I coped all the tubes. But, you know, at the beginning you're everything. And I do have, it's always a learning process of trying to be willing to give something up. And back then I didn't have the money always to hire people that could do it better. So I kept a lot of things probably too tight. And...

and then tried to train what I could. But by the time, I mean, from the aerospace side, some of these welders that we got, we had good people on the welding side. I had trained somebody up on the production management side that was doing a great job. And I actually still did every one of the custom drawings for every customer and on every bike.

until the day I left. Really? Yeah. So you were the chief engineer? Yeah. Did you do all the creative or did you use a collaboration on some of the creative stuff? When you say creative? Like when you came up with the Quasi-Moto was that like in your mind? This is how I want it? Yeah. And you drew it out? Yeah. And you started making it and stuff? Back then Cindy found a box of old Titus t-shirts the other day and they all...

Looked like somebody kind of hand drew some of the logos and the bikes on the t-shirts with a crayon Because I did You were the marketing guy, too. Yeah So I'd hand draw a lot of the stuff and Yeah, we just we went with that but um by the quasi moto time, I mean I met another guy that was industrial designer and uh Some of the machine parts and things I didn't

I didn't know 3D CAD and that was back then Pro-E was the program for that. I knew AutoCAD and that's, I would do it to a certain point. And then we had other people that would finish it, but I'd be behind their shoulder like, oh no, no

We got a whole room of industrial designers and mechanical engineers, and there's a concept of what the bike is gonna be. And I have input, but.

They come up with a lot of ideas and they sketch and we talk. And as a group, we define where things are going as far as the look of what a pivot bike is. But yeah, every step is kind of like tearing a band-aid off as you go along, because if it's something you had full control over and it was going well, you know, giving that up is super difficult. But you did. I have seen you look at somebody else's idea and frown, like, yeah, that's not my idea, and then see it.

on the next year's bike. So somewhere in there you said, you know, that's a better idea than me. And you allowed it to happen. And that's one of the things I had a hard time giving up, you know, because I thought all my ideas were great because I was my own editor, right? So I've seen you walk through your factory. And, you know, one thing that amazed me is that you know everybody there and I'm sure it's large enough now so that you'd stutter on a few names.

But back then you knew everybody and if somebody was doing something slightly different, you're like looking over your shoulder and I can see you in the back of your mind, I'll let it go. And it was okay. So for you to hand off the business at Titus after making it and being hands on, you had to at some point because to make a bicycle in Taiwan means you got to be there for like a month at a time sometimes. Yeah. When we started Pivot, I spent...

the seven months in Taiwan, I would come home and then there'd be something wrong and just fly back out and go and yeah, and be there. And yeah, Joel Smith, who was with Manitou and then started Tomac bikes on its second round. He was getting ready working on Tomac at the time and we had some of the same vendors and things and he moved his whole family there. Wow. And and

I was living out of a hotel, same hotel, usually it's the same room, and they knew me well, but it was actually a thought in my mind. Oh, that's a pretty good idea, moving your family over that. My wife would never have that for a second, and we had young kids, but so did he. And so it's kind of an interesting thing on that and getting things going. Taiwan.

I had more at the beginning with Titus, certainly way more failures than successes. And the fact that we were in house manufacturer, uh, really saved our bacon because as these things were failing horribly and it wasn't going well over there, we were still making it. Yeah. And it, it gave hope too, that if we could do it, you can do it. You just gotta do it differently. And

and then also learning that.

Same thing kind of Horst told me back then, we're not trying to make 500, we're trying to make 5,000, except now we're not trying to make 5,000, they're trying to make 50,000 or a million, or whatever the numbers that those large factories that we started with were, their numbers are so much higher in the processes, and to reset my expectations and the way me and

starting to bring Bill and Kevin over with me to Asia and us taking a look at Okay, this is our aerospace vision of production and this is the reality of making a consumer product and how do we bring these together so that they can build a very high quality consumer product and And hold our standards in there in the way they they're going to do things because they can tell you can put things in place Walk out the door

And they never told you that their welders are paid per piece. And if they don't finish the front triangle in five minutes or whatever the time is that.

It's not going to work. And the second you leave, they're going to go back to the way that they do things. And so it's, it's a rough deal because you, you only get 75% of what you agreed on. And then you have to go back the next month and the next month. And it's a tuning process over. It takes sometimes years to evolve it with a, with a, an Asian factory to where everything is just running right. It's it's

That's what I noticed. When I went there, I thought I could do it all in one trip. And I realized, no, you just got to go back. And it's not, you're not yelling at anybody. You're just saying, let's try this. And let's try that. And things got better. But you've done a good job. I mean, you look at the

the level that you've been able to do with Pivot. And knowing that they come out of factories, they're building bicycles right now while we talk, then they come out so good. It has to be that you build something here, you can build them here almost as good or better than you could build them over there. But the fact that you have an operation here at Pivot and an operation going overseas.

There's an understanding and a flow of information back and forth that you don't get from just trying to manage a business overseas and do all your designing here. I've seen that and it doesn't come up with a product as good as what you do. And it is amazing that, for instance, my last switchblade I rode for five years and I had yet to get a flat.

tire or any failures. I mean, there's been nothing. All the bearings are tight. Everything works. It's just an amazing thing. And at some point, I can only blame that, you know, part of that on the frame. Obviously, the frame works, the shock works. Yeah, the flat tire thing, you can give that credit to Stans No Tubes or something. I'm giving that credit to somebody that has no substance on this earth. I had to throw away my tooth last month because...

The stem wore a hole in it. That's a good problem to have. Your bikes have been incredibly reliable, especially during the Titus years, because that was when everybody was trying to figure out suspension. As an editor that was testing bikes all the time, I had to bring tools every time I brought a suspension bike out, because there was the possibility that a pivot bolt was going to fall out.

if something happened on almost every bikes and the Tituses that I rode from the beginning, from the original, um, moto lite's you know, which were, you know, built with whatever you could source from outside the bicycle industry suppliers, because that stuff just wasn't available at the time. All of those bikes were reliable. And that comes back to you. But what I'm getting at here is that like Henry Ford,

built his entire empire on partnerships, both with his labor and his designers, his engineers and stuff. He just found, surrounded himself with the right people. I think there's a funny story where he had so many patents that there was a congressional hearing that he was being barbecued by hired technical luminaries from universities, engineers and stuff that were world renowned.

And he was just being peppered by all these questions. They didn't believe he was smart enough to create this production line, this factory, and crank out cars that were actually affordable and reliable. And he was losing the battle. He was getting ground down. And finally, he stood up and says, look, I don't have answers to all of these professional questions. I can't answer all these questions. But if you give me five minutes.

I can go into my factory and bring a man out who can. And that was the end of the hearing. And that's pretty much, if you look at where you started and where you ended up, you surround yourself with some just awesome people. Partners, investors, your goodwill has, I believe when you started Pivot, didn't you get some return on you, some investors come forward who had been with you before?

Yeah, when we did the Viatech merger, they were also raising money from other outside investors. And some other people came in that weren't bike people at all. They were golf people, actually. And, and some of them became bike people during that time. And we became close. And even though the whole Viatech thing did not, and positively we remained friends and they, and they knew that.

even though they didn't want to even want to have a bicycle company as part of the deal they were investing in, that it wound up being the shining star of the group. And we became friends and they liked the way I did business and were willing to back what we wanted to do here. Yeah. So you, I mean, and in your factory, you know, you've got, I think now you have engineers in Stuttgart.

We have an office in Stuttgart, but all the engineers are still here. Okay. But I mean, your engineers are pretty sharp. I mean, you're not obviously, you're actually shaping your products now, but you've farmed out a lot. I think in the time between Pivot and...

By the time you got to pivot, you were pretty good at searching people out that could do these tasks, maybe a little bit better, or at least as good as you. Better. I mean, that was the thing starting this company and being able to do things from a fresh standpoint. I started to say earlier that at Titus, aside from those small investments,

When you're in college and they put the credit card offers on the table, on the desks, when you come into the classrooms, like I'd take those home and I had the host, you know, that was the, at the beginning, that was financing, my ability to build, buy tubing, sell a bike, build things in the garage. And so when you start a company that way, um, it's, it is hand to mouth. And then the, from the people you hire, you can't just,

go out and hire the best people, you can't afford the best people. So you start with what you can and you get it by with what you can. But if you have a chance to blank slate and say, hey, this is my business plan. This is what we need to do this. And I can't start the new company using QuickBooks because that won't last long. Then learn the at Titus And you need a...

operations manager that actually knows operations and finding good people from the get go that were right for the organization. And yeah, the majority of that first group of people, the first handful of employees, I think most all of them are still here other than one. And he was my business partner's nephew. And it was meant to be training wheels for him to move on to something bigger in their family businesses. So yeah, it's...

has worked out well with that philosophy of trying to find the best people for the role and find people that have knowledge base way beyond what I have in certain areas. Well, I think one of the themes is from the very beginning, you always had good partners. You know, not always. Well, yeah, it's true. Didn't work out with Viatech. That's one bad one out of many good ones.

Yeah. But let's talk about the invisible.

Chris Cocalis now. Most people who know you.

Most people think about your bikes. They see the bikes that come out and all that stuff. But you've been behind the scenes. I think you started your first partnerships, well, with AMP from the beginning. But I think you started doing evaluations and help. Weren't you working behind the scenes with Shimano for a while? Yep. And I think with most of your suppliers, you've played an invisible role, either pressuring

advising or evaluating with most of your key suppliers since the early Titus times. And I think that developed to a point where you're probably holding more secrets than any non-component manufacturer in the business because I've had conversations when we've been rolling down the trails and stuff on bikes. And I think at one time, we always talked about

frames and the performance of the bicycle. And somehow, after you started going to Asia a lot of times, almost all of our conversations were like, you know, I need a little bit more space in the rear triangles for this to get the exact chain line and blah, blah. And you just were sweating all these details about derailleur spacing and bottom bracket, this and that. And everything started to turn into like this talk about the technology that was coming. And it kind

As you, I heard from that you were actually on the, the Shimano's like, what do they call it? Their black, their skunk works or whatever, something like that. The skunk works a little different, but it was interesting after Shimano had their shifters with the, where the brake levers moved, the disaster shifters, the flippy floppers and the rapid rise rear derailleur and some of the technologies that came with that era.

That kind of culminated in I think a long period of Shimano design very being very internal and very private and then Having it not pay off in the marketplace. So they invited me and I believe Jeff Steber and I forget one other guy to be on the next generation XTR development team and actually be Access to engineers beyond the development team

ideas that drove what was going to happen. That was my last year of Titus and into the first year of Pivot that I had that level of involvement and yeah, developed the PressFit 92 bottom bracket because that is something we needed to launch Pivot the way the designs of the bikes were done and we were gonna do a internal.

bottom bracket with a wider BB shell, regardless of whether Shimano was on board or not. And yeah, it worked out nice. Yeah, because pretty much all the key players, it's Ram and Fox, Shimano, all of them have stories about the pressure that you put on them. It's always positive because you have really good ideas and specific things. I think that you mentioned in one of your interviews that...

Somewhere between the end of Titus and the beginning of Pivot, you realize that in order to make the bicycle the perfect bicycle that you wanted, the performance, the reliability, you're going to have to look at the bicycle and all of its components as one single unit. It was like a realization. So what about, about what time did that happen?

Yeah, I mean that was really from the design of the first Pivots and this is what we need to do this. And before we launched the company, what we wanted in the head tube size, the headset standard actually existed, but nobody was using it and Chris King wasn't supporting it. And there was a one year behind the scenes politicking really of, hey, okay, Shimano is on board with this press fit thing, but it's just Shimano.

we gotta get SRAM and we gotta get race face. And we gotta get Chris King to do a bottom bracket too. And we got all of them and we got Chris King at the time said he would never ever do anything but an external headset cup. And we got in about a five minute Tiffy argument and I was like, well then at some point you're not gonna be in the headset business anymore.

because this is gonna go this way, we're gonna push it pretty hard. And it would help us if Chris King was like on board with this standard, because you guys would add legitimacy to what we're gonna do. And we're gonna do it either way. And we got him on board and they do a lot of business in that type of headset. Today and...

And then same thing with the bottom bracket took a little longer on the SRAM side, but But time Within six months of launching pivot for the standards that we needed on that bicycle. We had everybody That we needed on board to do that. So that was a real

a real standard for the time being in the marketplace. What about the rear spacing? I know you've gone around with you stuck your neck out pretty far on an ultra wide rear axle spacing.

Yeah I'm pretty, I'm the most vocal publicly about it, but Kevin was the one losing his mind. It was when Boost came out.

We were struggling and we were trying to find the ability to do a long travel 29er and get the stiffness we want. The prototypes we were building had clearance problems and stiffness problems and there just wasn't enough space for what we needed to do. And then Boost came out and we saw just how much on each side we got and we're like, it's not nothing. It's something, but really?

One and a half millimeters on one side and three on the other or something like that. Yeah, it was not great. And then we had done all this work on the fat bike. And the big thing on the fat bike was that rear triangles were either 197 wide or 177. And if you were a fat bike racer,

You had to run 177 because you couldn't really pedal the cranks at race speeds when you had the Q factor of a 197 crank. And then, but if you had a 177 around, you couldn't run five inch tires, so you couldn't run in soft snow. And being with all the snow we have here in Phoenix is a real problem that we had to contend with. So it's the same deal. What 29ers, because your involvement with component makers actually just preceded.

the explosion of standards and wheel sizes that kind of overlapped Titus and Pivot. That was the big argument during that period of time. And when you try to stuff a larger, the same size tire and a larger wheel and keep the chainstays at some correct length, you run into a whole bunch of problems up by the crank set where...

A change in spacing in the rear axle gives you, and a little bit in the bottom bracket, I mean, these little tiny changes could actually allow you to run a reasonably wide tire on a 29er, which wasn't possible when it first came out. I mean, they were talking to, they were calling them 2.25 or 2.27 tires, but they were, if you measured them, they were like barely two inches wide. And they were still rubbing the frames and collecting mud down there.

Yeah, and it was just a, it was a shit show. So yeah, we discovered when we were still running front derailleurs, just how much we could move the chain ring out towards the crank arm on the fat bikes and still have a front derailleur not collide into the crank arm. And it was pretty substantial. I don't remember the exact number, but it allowed us with room to spare to do a custom chain ring offset and put the cranks for a 177 rear end.

on a 197 rear end bike and have the chain line be correct. And it was way more aggressive of a movement than what Super Boost became. And 157 already existed and it gave us. It was a downhill standard, right? Yeah, it gave us everything we needed from a spacing standpoint. And then we looked at all the downhill hubs. We built the first prototype bikes with downhill hubs. The whole idea behind downhill hubs was even spoke tension for 26 inch wheels.

ultra narrow hub flanges, which now you put on a 29 inch wheel and the rim, unless you were running like a really heavy duty Enve 29 inch carbon rim at the time, you just didn't have wheel stiffness. Yeah, that really sucked in the early days. In the moment, the extra moment on the larger diameter wheels, the tire on them, just, it felt like everything was wiggling back there. It over, it overextended the stiffness. So

of the suspension rear ends and everything really. Yeah, and so we thought we had a good opportunity also on the wheel side to make pretty substantial improvements with where things were today and on the clearance side of things and not affect Q factor, because people were just like, that was the immediate thing. Oh, our cranks are gonna get wide like a fat bike, but we designed it to run a 168 Q factor, which was the cross country-ish standard.

pretty much every trail bike crank is like 178 to 184 now. So we were able to achieve all of those things. And so it's interesting today when you see what's happened because Boost obviously was supported by the largest of manufacturers. We use it on our cross country bikes. It's got a solid following that's not going away.

But now all the drivetrain manufacturers have had to move their chainring standard out, their chain line, to 55, which is right about where it was moved for Superboost. But now the chain's got a cross chain to hit where the cog is on a 148 grand. And so they've made better chainrings. They've made chains that can cross chain.

and they've made it work. Yeah, a lot of effort went into forcing the standard chain lines to go across 12 cogs that could have been solved by just making a wider rear end and putting the cassette in the middle of the chain line. Yeah. And so there's been improvements made with like X-axis and stuff. Things being moved by a millimeter or two here. I mean, the Superboost standard is 56.5.

Now the chain line's 55. They used up some of the space to move their cassette out a little bit. And now, yeah. Works okay. But, is it perfect? Was it as perfect as it could have been? I still think 157 buys you more opportunity. But either way, they both work slightly differently.

We want to build a better bike. You force the industry to look at a better solution. And if they don't want to adopt the better solution, then they had to move everything. They had to cheat it out anyway. So basically, showing them the way, they didn't agree with you, but at least they've moved everything to where you wanted it. Well, a handful of companies did agree, and we worked very closely with SRAM. They were not happy. Obviously, they put a lot of money behind Boost though.

them and Trek where that was their thing. And then to somebody to come and kind of make fun of it and call it Superboost, it was meant to be a joke. It was. We should be laughing at ourselves about the whole thing. And then, yeah, it just...

At the time they were angry enough that they, even though we had a relationship, they basically said they would never, never do that for us. And we became big enough and, uh, other people asked us about super boost. And there's a handful of good high end companies that run one 57 spacing now. And, uh, and Sram makes cranks and they're actually labeled super boost, which was.

I didn't think they would do that when we finally got through everything and the first samples came and the spindles were laser etched super boost. I got a chuckle out of that and yeah, it's just a good option for longer travel trail bikes and I mean even downhill bikes now because you can bring that Q factor back in on the downhill bikes and go the other direction. But yeah, we'll continue to do that kind of stuff because...

You can't just leave all these parts on the bicycle stuck in time and expect the bicycle to advance. That is the biggest understatement you've ever said. I have. But people expect that. They expect nothing to ever change. But somehow miraculously like my same axles, my same wheels, my same everything's got to always fit on this bike. But somehow this bike over time.

has to get better. Imagine if we still had the same standards on motorcycles that were in the 30s and 40s. It's just no way. I mean, the whole reason that Harley-Davidson's are 45 degree V is because that's the only way they can put two cylinders inside of a bicycle frame. And it had a cool sound. So it's patented today. But yeah, I've got a number of my early bicycles.

hanging from the rafters and nothing except for the pedals. I think the pedals and the hand grips.

What else? And the saddle will fit a modern bike. The wheel sizes, the spacing, everything's changed. And for the good, I mean, when somebody buys a bike today, they don't have to think about what components are on it. And I think a lot of that goes back to people like you that have been in behind the scenes, especially during that.

the wheel changes, the disc brake standards, the diameters, that all the things, internal cable routing that didn't require a physicist and a magician to operate, all the things that have made these bicycles so reliable, easy to work on, all that stuff was resisted by bike shop mechanics and industry.

idiots like myself. I mean, I've resisted stuff that I thought would never work. And it turned out that it was way better. I mean, that's human nature and I do the same thing. And there's certain things that we kind of maybe missed the boat on and then figured out the best way to do it. And yeah, I mean, there's a big debate now. Should head should cables run through headsets and, uh, and, and today my stance is that's silly. why would you, why would you do that?

Why would you create a problem that doesn't really need to accept it looks really good? Well, and we are people are passionate about their bikes and the way their bikes look. And it is it's a it's a luxury consumer product. And if the end consumer, if that's what they want, if they're voting with their dollars and saying, that's how I want my bike to be, then it's our job to do it the best way possible and make it not a problem.

So you do have a problem next year that you're gonna have to solve. Well, there's always a problem to solve. But no. And we might not be the one solving it. But as cables go away and more electronic stuff comes, I understand where customers wanna go. And some things we can take a stand on and say, yeah, that's not us, we're not going there. Other things, we gotta kinda see how it plays out and then do the best version of it that there is.

the humility of doing what the customer wants? Yeah, that's what we're here for. Building better bikes and making people's lives better and happier. And that means ride quality, but it also means satisfaction and that they love what the ownership of their pivot or whatever they're buying. And you gotta wanna look at it every day and be proud of it. And if there's something about that you don't like or wish was different, then it's our job to address that.

Well, I can see the happiness, feel the happiness here because when I was making bicycles.

when you hand over your bicycle, not only do you have something that you built, but you're basically, you're not just selling bikes, you're selling happiness. I mean, I've raced motorcycles, I fly airplanes, I build airplanes. I have never stuck with anything as long as I've stuck with mountain bikes. And every time I come back from a mountain bike ride, I'm happy. Even if I was just, you know, a 70 year old cranky idiot.

when I left home, when I come back, I'm just like, yeah, especially on the last bike I have. I thank you very much for letting me ride one, but I've been riding the new Switchblade.

And my question is, what would happen if that first bike you rode that you destroyed and handed over to your friend was the latest version of the Switchblade? If you started there.

What would we be riding today? I don't know. Because that's somebody. I've been riding mountain bikes since almost the beginning of the sport. And I have never ridden a mountain bike that's been more fun than that one. It's just, it does everything I want. It never complains. It's quiet. It doesn't rattle. It shifts when I want to shift. It's not electric. And I kind of like that because it's like,

a four-stroke off-road motorcycle. You fill it full of gas and you leave it in your garage. And one day you wake up and you go, I want to ride my bike. And you kick it over or you hit the electric start button and it starts up and you go ride your bike. That's what it's like. It's waiting for me in my garage for that day. When I look out. When the snow melts. Yeah, when the snow melts and the trails are hard, I just throw it in the back of my car. And I don't even look at it except for, you know.

I'm anal about air pressure. But and I go out and ride and it's like, it's like a pal. It's like it's a friend. And I can totally rely on it, you know. And that's just like, if you're going to like end a life of completely being devoted to a mountain bike, this is the end. I don't have to have anything else. This is like, this is the end of my life here. I'll take this bike into my grave. And it's like

What would happen if you started your career with that bike? With the 2024 Switchblade was the first bike you ever rode. Could you make it better? Can always make it better, but yeah, the gains are so much more incremental. And when I look at some of the brands and things that have launched, there's a lot of marketing and pow that goes behind more than necessarily is this truly

a next level innovative product. I mean, there's a lot of, for us, there's innovation and there's evolution. When we look at something like the e-bikes and we're on our fourth, fifth generation and many of our competitors are on their first bike, and it's like, we know what you're going through. We know what you're gonna go through. And yeah, and so the experience matters in...

And being able to do that, you got to start somewhere and it is going to get better. It always is. But everything's so good. It's like, if you've written dirt bikes in the last 10 years, you can, I can get on a, well, I've got a 2012 KTM in my garage and I've got a 2023 Husqvarna. They're both 350's. They're both made by the same company. And.

and they're both still great. They're both modern and not a lot of things have changed on standards or anything since that time. One weighs almost 50 pounds less than. 50? Yeah. That's substantial, especially for a little guy like me. I'm sorry, I was comparing that to my wife's Honda, older Honda, but it was more like 35, 38 pounds, but, and you just sit on them and there's enough

Differences, they both feel like dirt bike, they both have electric starters, both have fuel injection. Go for all the modern stuff. Suspension is, I think you could probably take the forks out of one and shove it in the other. No major standard changes. But tweak, tweak is a radically different picture between those two motorcycles. But it's not like I couldn't go out and race to 2012 and go just as fast, whereas

If you go back that many years in the bike, oh, we don't have the same wheel size as now. I mean, the geometry is radically different and now mountain bikes are good. Geometry is good. And will it tweak a little here and there? Same as motorcycles, they're changing. Oh, KTM changed their head angle a half a degree and added more trail. Next year they take the trail out and change their fork offset. And it's just like, ee, ee.

We're kind of in that geometry is probably not going to have like major changes and revival. I don't know. I still think there should be a wheel size between 27 and a half and 29. I think that is going to be the sweet spot. But, uh, um, just putting that out there in case anybody from a tire rim side wants to do it. I'm in, um, but yeah, we're w the bike industry is in a great place and people who start mountain biking now. Um,

can really just concentrate on riding and having a great time. And that's just awesome when we can give a bike to somebody and they get their new bike and it changes their capabilities and their happiness. And they're just, we like getting Christmas cards and from customers and pictures of groups of people together with all their pivots and it really drives what we do. It's nice, because Bill and I and Kevin.

We could go sit in the back of the machine shop and knock out cool lugs and carbon tubes and build whatever we want just for us, but we don't want to do it just for us. So it's, it's great to be able to, to kind of reap the, the happiness and rewards of seeing other people enjoy what we do. Does it, does riding a new bike that you've created make you as happy as a me as the last one made me? I am.

I am completely driven by the next prototype. I just, yeah, when's it going to be done guys? I'm in the back and just like, how can we push this a little bit faster when a, when a company doesn't get us a prototype or a sample part that, that bike can't be built without that part.

I'm the guy on the phone every day. Do you have a tracking number? What's going on? Making people miserable for 35 years. Yeah. Or telling my purchasing department, can you call him again? What's going on with that? What do you mean they closed for Christmas? So yeah, we keep it fun. 

And we will keep it fun in the future. Not only the developing process we embrace so closely at Pivot, but also for you out there while riding our bikes. Our path towards making every bike better than before will continue and we are excited to share our story along the way.