Mountain Cog
Mountain bike podcast that will make you laugh and learn. Featuring a wide range of passionate guests. Available everywhere (Apple, Spotify etc).
Mountain Cog
102 - Inside Park Tool: The World's Largest Bicycle Tool Company with Truman Purdy
Go inside Park Tool, the world's largest bicycle tool company, with Technical Expert Truman Purdy in this deep-dive interview. Learn the fascinating origin story of how Art Engstrom and Howard Hawkins transformed from a small Schwinn repair shop in Minnesota to creating the iconic blue tools that define professional bike maintenance today. Discover why Park Tool switched from red Schwinn-branded tools to their trademark blue color, how they protect their brand identity, and the surprising business decisions that built their global dominance in bicycle tool manufacturing.
Truman reveals exciting details about Park Tool's newest innovation: the PRS-30 manual lift bike stand that combines the convenience of electric lifting with the reliability of manual operation. With 500+ tools in their catalog and 75% manufactured in-house at their Minnesota facility, Park Tool continues to evolve bike maintenance technology for both professional bike shops and home mechanics. Get insider insights into tool development processes, pricing strategies, Amazon marketplace challenges, and why more than ~50% of Park Tool sales now go directly to home mechanics rather than bike shops.
Website: https://www.parktool.com/en-us/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/parktoolcompany
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Sounds good. Hello, thanks for having me here today. My name is josh uh and I am an addict. I've been addicted for I don't know, it's probably been 20 years. Um, I've, I I'm aware, I know that, like um, you know, the first step is kind of acceptance and I realized that I'm an addict. Um, just let it out, man.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I know this is hard. Um, it's got worse than COVID. Um, I just, I just saw the stuff that I wanted and on the park tool website and I just kept ordering, and ordering, and ordering. And I'm a home mechanic, I have several hundred park tools. You have a whole bike shop right, which is more than, which is probably 180 more than any, but um, since we started this podcast, we've been stoked um to talk to park tool and just sent a cold email and you guys responded.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, it's awesome.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So, uh, yeah, so it's a Friday night. Dan and I just got done riding a new social trail that was cut this week or open this week. Uh, out by us, us, um, and so we're sweaty and a little sore. It was fun. We rode for a couple hours. Yeah, um, lacy kicked my ass as normal, she kicks everybody's ass. She's fast, lacy's my wife, um, but we're here with uh truman purdy from the one and only park tools. How are you this evening, sir?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I am doing well and uh yeah, I've got a similar problem. It's been going on for a long time.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I'd imagine you get a better price than I do, though yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, maybe on those tools.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:What did you do before park Truman?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Before park I was working in bike shops Were you. I worked in about four or five different bike shops and in between there did I was a automotive, I did some automotive. That's where I went for school, to school for automotive right on I worked on tractors and trucks and concrete stuff and uh, uh, got back into bikes and always been into tools, so yeah, always been into tools. That's always the that's been. My history has always been tinkering, taking stuff apart, working with tools, and so, yeah, now I have.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Now I just work with tools all the time so, truman, are you a roadie or do you have fun when you ride your bike?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I like to have fun when I ride my bike, that's so mean roadies have fun too they might, I don't know.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:It feels like they're suffering they do like.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Uh, I feel like in, you know, roadies are like formula one.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:They're formula one fun I thought downhill was formula. No, that's baha truck. Okay, yeah, downhill's more like baha.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Go as fast as you can and see how, how smooth you can keep your head over over the terrain. Formula one is, like all about grip and fast and yeah, so truan, what do you ride?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:what bikes do you have at the moment?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):so I have uh. Right now I have a couple hardtails for my mountain bikes. I got a uh, basically the two identical bikes. I just have different parts on each one to try, try different things, right? So I have a surly karate monkey oh, that's a good bike.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I've had that bike, you know kind of built out nice.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I mean for a karate monkey it's built out better than a lot of them right but then I have a all city. Um, oh boy, what is this thing?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:electric queen oh really, oh nice. Yeah, it's a fun little fun little bike oh cool, oh yeah, I yeah, I always liked their paint jobs too.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I had to have it. That was the reason why I bought it. It was a splatter job, yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And at the beginning of COVID I sold my full suspension bike because the prices were. I mean it was crazy you could not sell your nice bike because people were giving you more than you paid for.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Go ahead and tell your story, dan Well nice bike, because people were giving you more than you're, way more than you paid for. Go ahead and tell your story, dan Well, yeah, I mean I, I sold all my bikes in my garage. We were selling 26 inch bikes out of our garages that were lying around forever, you know and getting good money for him and getting good money for him, and I started calling all my friends hey, you know that bike that you never ride, that's gathering dust. Can you give it to me?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah Well yeah, I actually did say that I would say like, look, if you're not going to do anything, give it to me and I'll sell it. But I encourage them to sell it too. But yeah, we were out of bikes and so we would call in all of our friends, bring your bikes in so we can sell them for you. And we'd sell them on consignment.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):That's a great idea. Yeah, the bike shop helped a local bike shop get opened up and that was a huge part of their business during covid was these, you know, just uh, consignment bikes and used bikes, just people bringing them in and selling them and dude, what a crazy time to start a shop during covid, when like you can't or like nothing's available, you're like is it really?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):this hard? Yeah, it was almost the opposite oh, really it was like 2019. I started helping them get going and it was we were looking at locations and I they were talking about okay, what accounts do I need to open up? It was people that had not come from the bike industry at all. One from one was a nurse, you know kind of a nurse manager and then one that came from managing a golf course and they went out to, I think, asheville and they went to the hub and they fell in love and they said we want to do this as our retirement gig.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And they came back and were like, hey, can you help us get this open? It's one of my best friend's parents and so I was like, yeah, this sounds awesome. So we looked around and it was a fun process doing that and then kind of renovating. And then I'm sitting there like, okay, here's about bikes, selling bikes. You know telling them all of the bad, you know maybe all of the difficult things about bike shops. You know like there's going to be customers that come in and they look around and you're going to help them for an hour or something and they're going to go buy it on Amazon or something. Or there's going to be people who come in and they come in three different times and then they go and buy it from some other bike shop. Or you know getting them ready for those those ups and downs. You know, the next day somebody is going to come in and buy three $2,000 bikes and it's just going to be really sweet that day. And then COVID hit and so they were kind of freaking out.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Did they have inventory before COVID hit?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:They did, oh. So that's a great time to get in.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):That is a great time then yeah, I mean, at least you get that little boost.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):They had inventory and they threw down a lot of money on getting inventory as much as they could and they put in all these mad you know, because all the they got in with Giant because there was another Trek store in our small little town and so they couldn't get in Trek and in the Midwest Trek is really the big name that everybody knows and goes after. So they picked up Giant and then they did Surly and All City and now they have Santa Cruz and a couple other brands.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):But yeah so then they started selling bikes during COVID and, man, they were like Truman, what were you talking about?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, this is golden People just walk in and they just point at a bike and say I want that. And they walk out.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):They give us money and they walk out the door or they they say I want that, oh, it's not the right size, oh, I'll wait six months, but I'll pay you today.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And then giant just kept on filling. You know, they just kept on giving them bikes. They sold so many bikes. That's awesome, that's the were you warning them that like this is not normal, don't consider, please, please, don't get used to this. I told him I was like this is not normal, this will. There's a bubble and it's gonna pop. Don't get stuck with the most inventory, that's gonna be not worth a bunch yeah, buy a new building they actually kind of did so.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It's a really cool setup. They bought what used to be. You know, when I was five years old, my dad would bring me there to buy parts. It was an old parts store and then it got turned into a place. It got turned into like a potting studio and then it got turned into a place. It got turned into like a potting studio and then it got turned into a restore Um and and it's way it's off the beaten path. And so when we were looking at it and we were like I'm like this is gonna you have to make this a destination and Steph looked at me and she's like this is going to be a destination, I was like, all right, let's do this.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Nice.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And uh, and so they. So it's a brewery, it's a micro brewery with a bar like a big long bar and a bike shop.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Oh, that's cool.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And so Ellis, their other son, is brewing beer and I'm behind, you know, maybe behind the counter fixing bikes, and then my friend Derek's fixing bikes behind the counter and people are just sitting in the middle, in the middle of all of it, watching us kind of do our thing, which is, yeah, it's kind of weird to have people watching you fix bikes and asking you questions as you're doing stuff, like in a bigger way than normal. Normally there's just a couple people there, yeah, um, but this, you know, there's can be 30 people sitting there and uh, so it was interesting. But it is a really cool environment. They actually have, um, they have a big music fest there called Kinney stock. That's the local uh river which runs right in front of it.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Right.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And so they have these some big bands. They have thousands of people there and they, you know, they sell a ton of beer and have a bunch of music going on and it's it's a really cool space.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I want to go there. What's the name of the shop?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It's called the garage.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:That's cool.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):You got a shirt.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:He's got a shirt. He's got the shirt on. He's repping the shirt.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That's that I mean that's been the dream of most bike shop owners is to have that combination of like a brewery or what I want Strip club. Oh yeah.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I already did that. It didn't work. The girls kept getting grease on them. It just didn't work out.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:There was problems with the saddle. No, I wanted a brewery on one side of the bike shop, a cafe-like coffee shop on the other side, and then in the back I wanted a big window, and in the back of the shop I wanted a frame builder to be building frames back there and that's been my dream.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You can see the sparks and stuff from the welder.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, so the guys in there are making bikes in the back room. You can go on your group ride in the morning and have coffee, or you can come in after your ride and and have a have a beer tacos and beer. Yeah, um, I I still want to do that. I don't know if I'll ever get to, because you gotta that's. That's more than three businesses to run right guru bikes 2.0 yeah, maybe somewhere on the east side of tucson maybe yeah I just uh, yeah, that's an insight, that's joke.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It was a big undertaking for them. It took a lot of energy to get them to where they're at, and it took a lot of risk and a lot of vision and a lot of investment, but now it seems to be all paying off for them.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That's good. Good diversity too, Good job to Steph and Matt.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):They've been doing a really good job with that, oh that's awesome. And so the brewery part actually came from not being able to get a liquor license, so they pretty much had to become a micro brewery to get to get a micro brewery license which was easier than getting a liquor license easier than getting a liquor wow, but it's a micro brewery you in wisconsin you can sell other people's beer. Yeah, you can have like what do you call them?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:like, um, uh, like visitor taps or something like that. That's, that's not the right word. Brian vance at catalina brewing is going to be upset with me, but it's, uh, it's you. You bring over other taps.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):You know guests, there we go, guest taps, yeah so yeah yeah, and and, but they have to be a small. They have to also be small. So I think something like less than 30 000 barrels a year, or something like that right uh, in wisconsin is the rule and um, but yeah, the his, his beer is really good.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):He's a chemist and he actually just quit his job as a chemist working for really a really big company and now he's just starting to brew beer all the time. He got a new set of brewing equipment and they are having a hard time keeping up with how much beer they're selling. That's awesome that's crazy.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Turns out, chemists make good brew masters. Well, I mean it basically is chemistry right, yeah?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I bet you they're great bakers too, probably, yeah, so a lot of chemistry going on well, I didn't expect us to do a 10 minute um advertisement for the garage, but it sounds like it was worth it, but you're, but you're if you're in ellsworth, wisconsin if you're in ellsworth, wisconsin, yeah you got to go by this is uh river falls oh, river falls, river falls wisconsin go check out the garage we get a lot of snow snowbirds here, so I bet, uh, some of some of the people in tucson have probably been there or lived there.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah, yeah well, we're gonna, my wife and I, at some point I don't know if it'll be this year, next year, some year we're gonna, oh, minnesota or get the van we're gonna get the van and just go and, uh, we'll definitely stop by the garage.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, yeah, adventures well, we we've got a lot of good trails in our area. We have uh. So the map over here, that's one of the original maps of our uh trail system that me and my buddies and a lot of people in our community have been working on for a long time. That's an old map. We have almost 10 10 miles of trails there, which isn't a ton, but it's a lot of good miles and we keep it really well maintained. That's good and so that's in town and it's one of the more aggressive trails in the Twin Cities area, so there's a lot of jumps and gaps and wood features and there's a big jump line which you don't get a lot of in the Twin Cities area.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, so 10 miles of that kind of stuff.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:That's a lot.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That's awesome, yeah, yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, it's, it's really good, and now we have. So there was a group, a local group, which stemmed from the NICA group, uh, and they've uh, it's called Wiki is their group and they've opened two trail systems and both are more than 10 miles now, but they're at state parks, so they have access to more miles of, uh, or more, more acres of trail, um, and those are really really cool trails too. The terrain is fantastic and the trails that were really well built, because we've been building ours by hand for forever and they went in there five years ago and just started going to town with machines.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And they put in a ton, of ton of miles really fast and they were it's really cool does park tool have trail building tools? We don't no we have not forayed into that. I feel like that's a good place to go.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I do, I really do, because it's becoming popular you know, I keep seeing these little compact ones that, like you know, have couplers and stuff so you can put them together so yeah, that one's really cool, I feel like some blue ones, need to happen, so yeah maybe
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I'll start spray painting all of my. I'll get some color match and violate their patent. I know that's a big deal, the color's a big deal for you guys, but I'll spray paint on my as long as it's not a bicycle tool you're good to go it can be as blue as you ever wanted, as long as it's not a bicycle tool.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):But yeah, that's. It's an interesting topic. The uh, the trademark the blue, the blue color trademark.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And uh, so Eric the boss man, he, you know, in the early two thousands, decided to trademark that blue color and it's, it's a big deal. It is a big deal and it's unfortunate that sometimes we look pretty mean when we have to enforce it. Right, but in but, in order to have it and prevent big companies from using blue as their color or having a lot of companies from outside the US come in with blue tools that just look exactly like ours. And now we can protect ourselves and say, hey, you can't have that. We were sending a cease and desist. Just make it purple, whatever like, but not a blue shade of purple, because we have, like, there's a whole. If you're within some shade of blue, there's, um, some rules about that, but it's kind of like, um, you know, having brown trucks for a shipping company or you know having a green tractors or, oh yeah, green track, all that stuff, yeah, I mean you're not going to get any complaints from me, man, I'm a corporate strategist and that's your brand identity and you got to protect that.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:And, like my like, I look at my, my, my, uh, extensive collection of park tools and I'm proud of the fact that I got this wall of blue out there right, and I have a couple spots that are not blue because you know I bought some off-brand or something and I'm like I gotta, I gotta fix that I gotta fix that hole right there where it's not blue, it's.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:It messes up the aesthetic so so the founder, founder of park came from like a schwinn store in, yeah, yeah, and so did, because I remember old Schwinn tools. They were red, uh, I don't remember what. The ones that I remember were the ones that you'd get with the bike, which were like stamped steel. My grandpa had them in, uh, in his, in his basement with his bikes, and they'd be these stamped steel, um, multi tools.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:They look like just pieces of steel with like shapes stamped out of them, stamped out of them so they'd fit nuts and and what have you and so that's kind of cool I mean at one point, one point you guys were actually making in the early days, making the schwinn tools right and they were red, and then you those were actually park tools and then they they switched over to the blue and they dropped the schwinn name and went all park. As I understand it, is that right.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yep, that's that's exactly what happened. So I'll just tell a little bit of an origin story. So Art Engstrom and Howard Hawkins those were the two founders of Park Tool. They started a repair shop in Hazel Park, which is basically a very, very close suburb of St Paul, minnesota, and they repaired bikes, of course, but they also did radio repair and skate sharpening and all kinds of different things, because they had just gotten back from the war, didn't know what they wanted to do.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):You know, we're trying to figure out how to make enough, make money for their families. So they're, you know, I think art was living in his basement because they hadn't even built the house yet, they just built, could pay for the foundation and uh, so they started this bike shop and and it started going better and better and better and better. And then they, you know, with Schwinn, and then they got to be the largest Schwinn dealer in the United States, and so they were. They were huge and you know, the big, big wigs at Schwinn were coming by and they were talking strategy and doing all of these things and Schwinn back in the day was a big deal. Yeah, they were doing education before anybody.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):They were doing all of these things to help the dealers do a better job and create professionalism and get more people in the door. And you know, art and Howard, there's a couple of different things they did. One of these things was that is really fun, is? It's one of the I call it like a win, win, win situation. They had the boy scouts come to them and they're like hey, we want to do something for you guys. So they were like what, if you guys give out flyers sale flyers for our bikes, you know at the store and we'll give you 5 cents per flyer that you give out. And so they gave out like 30,000 flyers a year and just spread like wildfire.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:And this was before the internet and you had all those. Yeah yeah, that's a big deal.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, way before the internet. This was in the sixties, fifties or sixties and um. And then, you know, they started making their own tools in the back to make things more efficient and one of the first things they made was a repair stand. Oh, and that changed. The the Schwinn rep came in and he was like what is this?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:What were they using before?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):that like I can't upside down on a bench.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I can't even imagine that like it'd be a pain in the ass?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:huh, it would be, I mean because I did that when I was a kid. You know, working out on the sidewalk with your bike upside down and scratching up everything, and you know like, yeah, I think some people back in the day also did this suspended from the ceiling like strings oh yeah like pulley systems and stuff, yeah, but yeah, it was mostly a bike's upside down on a repair bench, wow.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So, but yeah, they made this. It's a really cool stand. I really appreciate it because it's got like, uh, the base of a uh clawfoot table and then a giant shell casing from tank or something filled with filled with concrete or something filled with, filled with concrete or something filled with concrete, with a forward rear end axle sticking out the top of it.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Weighed like 2000 pounds with a ring on it with holes, and then another axle coming out of it, and then a cam over center clamp, which we still basically sell a version of it today, and the what? The? But you know, the silver clamps, not our newer black clamp, but the silver clamps where you throw the arm back yeah but on that one the arm was a hockey stick and so minnesota it was.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It was really cool and so they got in. So they they were like we, we want to buy a bunch of these if you can make more of them. So I think at that point howard went to dunwoody, which is a technical college in our area, and got a degree and they started building tools. They started with that repair stand, got into making tools for schwinn, like the cone wrenches started as red with schwinn.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Um, some of the stamped steel little uh little wrenches I don't know if they made the multi little uh little wrenches. I don't know if they made the multi-tools, but the little wrenches they got into those and I have a couple around here somewhere. But uh, and then they got to the point where they were still running this huge Schwinn shop and they were running this tool company and they, they just had this vision of we think that the tool company is going to take off. Let's go with that, let's sell the bike business to somebody else and let's do this full time. And they started doing that and and kind of, the rest is history and it's come. You know, today we're the world's largest bicycle tool company. That's awesome.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Truman, how big are you guys? How many employees do you have?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):We're not, you know it's. We're the world's largest tool bicycle tool company.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, there's four of us Massive yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):There's four of us.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Is there really only four of you?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So there's it depends on how you count Like the market share significantly changes, like, okay, the, the market share significantly changes. There's a lot. There's a lot of small tool companies, I would say making more um, a lot of like more niche tools, right, which, a lot of their tools are amazing and uh, but I would say there's four kind of major um, if you start to consider some of the ones that aren't sold in the us but are sold in the in europe, like cyclists and var, there's probably five major bicycle tool companies in the world, right, um, and how many employees do you have, though?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):so we're at about 70.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Oh okay, I thought you said you had four employees. Yeah, I was.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I was so confused there I was like this is not working.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I can't figure this out. We talked to outbound and I think they have six. I think they added one last, I heard, but outbound.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I was so confused there I was like this is not working. I can't figure this out. We talked to Outbound and I think they have six. I think they added one last, I heard.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:But Outbound that I can reconcile.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Park Tool 70 feels right, yeah, that does.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):No, we have basically, well, three, three sales guys, so there's three people doing the same thing, and then three engineers, so we have a lot more than four, that's for sure. But the majority of them are manufacturing and so we're kind of a unique facility where we have an office with 15 people and then that's directly connected. And then that's directly connected. You walk through a door and then there's a manufacturing facility with welding, machining, packaging, shipping, storage, QC, engineering.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So you guys build everything. You guys build everything there.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):We build about 75% of our products in-house. We of course I'm not going to say that we do everything, because we don't we have vendors that do all kinds of stuff for us, so we have a person who does a lot of our plating. We have anodizing people, chrome plating people and nickel oxide and all kinds of different platings and stampers and people that dip for us all kinds of places, and then we import stuff from Taiwan and China and we either use those are just parts for assembly or they, you know, maybe they come in as a mostly complete product and we do a final assembly on it. But yeah, most of all of it is done in-house and so it's a. It's a pretty cool facility to walk through.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:There's a lot of stuff going on. Truman, could you take us through the development process of a tool, from the original concept or idea all the way through final production? What are the steps that you guys go through?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):The earliest step is somebody in the product team. There's about 10 people kind of involved with it, but basically six people that are really involved with the product, and I'm on that team, and so somebody will come to that team with an idea and you don't just come with like a loosey-goosey idea. You've got to come with something that's really solid, with some legs on it, and then you kind of put up a reason that it's going to. It's why it is, why is this something important that we should make? How is it going to stick? How many do you think are going to sell? What are the liabilities? Like what's going on with this product? Like what's going on with this product. And then after that it's, and then it goes into okay, what's the manufacturability of it? But just as like a conceptual time, you're just sitting there like just thinking about it. You haven't even really made a prototype yet, and sometimes the person who has the idea comes with a prototype because they don't believe, because it's easier to show somebody how something works rather than explain it. So you bring up maybe a very loose prototype to a meeting or you explain it and then it's like yeah, and then everybody agrees, or really just the boss man agrees, says yeah, I think that's a viable, viable one degrees. Says yeah, I think that's a viable, viable one. And uh, and then the engineers hop in and drawing, start getting created, prototypes start flowing.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):We go through a prototyping process and then, once we have some pretty solid prototypes, then we start going into getting uh, more kind of uh, production style samples and then we really get into the product and then we start QCing those samples and then we start really hammering on testing them and then we start putting in POs and orders and get and that's where things really kind of ramp up, because at that point you really you're starting to talk about all the little things. You know, a lot of times lots of people come to us with ideas and a lot of those people come to us with an idea and they're like they think it's worth it, it is worth something. I'm not going to say it's not worth something. That first repair stand to park tool, that was worth something.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And there's a ton of ideas that come to us and they're totally worth something. And sometimes they come and they're like I wanted this idea, I want an nda. It's like if you want an nda, you're gonna want some kind of cut and maybe we'll give it to you, maybe it's, maybe it's not worth it, you never know, know, um, but that, uh, the idea stem can stem from somebody kind of writing in. Some people write in and they're like hey, here's an idea If you guys want to run with it.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:but he's got an idea for you, I wait which one. Yeah, you got a lot, oh no.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Which yeah, probably. But. I but I had, I was gonna say the one of my favorite new tools. I did an instagram post about it and I modified it because it wasn't quite what I needed as a as a suspension guy. It's your I don't know what the names are and I forgive me because I never memorize this stuff. It's the little black cube that does the uh air caps on forks. Yeah, so I did a post when I got it. The guys got it for me at work as a gift and they're like here.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:This is you should probably explain what you do oh yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So I, aside from owning a bike shop, I also have a suspension center and we do a ton of suspension for, geographically, the whole area. We get shops from all over the country, but we do them for shops as well as ourselves, and so we do a lot of volume and uh, and so I'm I'm constantly oily in the back working on suspension, and the amount of times that I've had to take a tool to a fox air cap just to break it free, you know, and even maybe left a wrench mark because it was so tight for some reason yeah you know, and uh, they came out with this new tool.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:What's it called? Uh?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I think it's called the ftc if that's something yeah fork top cap tool.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, something, yeah, and so it's just like that looks it's just a cube, but each side of the cube has a different interface for different forks right and so the only thing that I did and so I posted this on my instagram for the, the suspension shop um, I had to drill holes through the center of all of them because I use that tool to break free like adjusters that have. You know, I don't want to spin that adjuster all the way, and like use when I'm taking the screw or the, the, the bolt out of it, I don't want that worm drive inside to get bound up, you know. So I'll put the top cap tool on, I put the tool through the tool, through the, the, the, the cube, and then I can hold the top cap and break that, that nut free, or that. That. I don't even know what you call it. Screw yeah, I mean, it's a hex head screw, so button head usually, and so that's cool.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:It's so. I even posted something on my Instagram hey Park. This is version 2.0. You're welcome to it so we don't need an NDA.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You can have that one. You can have it, yeah, yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:But but yeah, it's now one of my favorite tools Cause, like for instance, on Fox fit forks, they have a black adjuster for their low speed compression or, and I have to take that whole assembly apart and I don't like that thing binding up. I don't want to just, you know, unthread that by letting the worm drive inside bind up, cause that's alloy, you know, and can damage. So it's really cool.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So yeah, yeah, I'm stoked to hear about that because that was a tool that we were really excited about and it was it's very simple, but it's kind of where I was going is the nitty-gritty on the tool stuff is it, or products in general.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):it is some of the most difficult stuff to do, you know, figuring out the correct packaging, figuring out the correct you know, writing appropriate instructions, coming up with taking all the pictures, making graphics for the instructions and the parts diagrams, and there's so much behind the scenes. And then the marketing aspect of all of it, you know getting it in front of people. You know getting them distributed all throughout and then fostering all the relationships with all of those people that are selling and getting the timeline all to work. Where you launch a product, everybody has it, everybody can buy it when they're excited about it, and it's, it's just it's. That's what I find is the more difficult part. You know, having an idea and kind of sussing out a design is one thing. All of that is really where the meat and potatoes are the business, and it's really it's fun to see, it's fun to be part of too.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Truman, how many? Do you know? How many tools you guys have you offer for sale right now?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Roughly any idea? Roughly, roughly 500 oh, jesus.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So you gotta, you gotta, call some of those every year, right, some of them gotta fall off the lifts every year yeah, and sometimes, you know, sometimes boss man comes in and he's like, yeah, I think we gotta get rid of this one. No, what are you thinking? Not that, anything but that. And then you look at the sales and you're like, man, this is a bummer. And and you guys have probably had that happen and you're like, well, how did they get rid of that was so awesome? Yeah, well, it's probably because we were selling 50 of them a year or something, or do you not just have a shelf where you have like 25 lying around forever?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:so?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):no, no just in time, baby we have a museum where we try to keep one of the stuff, which is crazy. It's been difficult to keep one yeah, a lot of just one, somebody came. Somebody came in with a warranty item it was a ruler and they came in and the front desk lady called me and she's like, hey, can you come and talk to this guy? I don't think this is a warranty and I'm not a warranty person. And so I go out there and I'm like, hey, how's it going?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:And I pick up this ruler and it's from the 60s they're trying to warranty it yeah. That's awesome.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):What goes wrong on a ruler? Well, interesting question. So back we did it. It was painted, so it was an aluminum stamped out ruler, and then all the lines and everything were painted on and paint wears off. Oh yeah, so half the paint had worn off of one side that he was using the most. And so he brings this ruler and I'm like I've never seen this and so I'm like this was made 20 years before I was born.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:You're like hey, buddy this thing only lasts 60 years. What's wrong with you people?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):and so I'm like yeah, here's a new ruler. The only stipulation is, I get to keep this one and or we get to keep this one. So I, I take that one and I in there. We never. We haven't seen one for probably 30 years, right? Um, it was a because we did the ruler in red and we did the ruler in blue, and it was in blue for a very short period of time, before we went to our current ruler, which has markings that are stamped in, and so they are. They actually have texture, so you can't wear all the markings off right and um, so that was added to the, the, the wall.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I just I got it like, well, this is cool and put it on the wall next to all the other stuff. But people call up there's a, there's a lot the other stuff. But people call up there's a. There's a lot of collectors out there and people call up and they ask for some interesting things. They want original instructions to put into the packaging that they found. They want X, y or Z, oh. And a lot of times they call up and they talk, they say a tool, and I'm like what are you talking about? So we have a, we have a history log. I can go in there and I'm like, oh, yeah, that tool, okay, cool, yeah, yeah, we have nothing about that tool. I can go and into a deep dark room with a filing cabinet and I can find a drawing from way back in the day.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):But it's not be, it's not gonna help anybody out, it doesn't there's no parts for it or anything but right I guess it is we are we on the parts thing, I just gotta say the one thing just pat ourselves on the back a little bit.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Um, parts, we are really good at holding on to parts and and so, like torque wrenches, we have a bunch of parts. Uh, we don't necessarily sell all the parts that we have for torque wrenches, because these people send these in for calibration. Or if you have one that's broken, you can send it in for calibration and we'll fix it, and then, you know, calibrate it and send it back to you. Um, because when you start messing with parts on these, you start messing with the calibration. So we don't feel like we should encourage people to fix it on their own Right. But we have parts for all of our torque wrenches that we've pretty much ever sold. We have parts for all kinds of things you know, like our CN10s, um, the cutters, the, the, the invisible spring that's inside of them yeah.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:For our listeners he's showing. He's giving us a show and tell of some of these parts that he's got laying around his house.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I I had a quick question. You brought up collectors. Do you know a guy named fast eddie?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I've heard of fast eddie. Have you okay? So?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:one of one of our employees is friends with him and he's he's our current. You know, um, I don't know what you call a tool, a file or whatever. You tool addict, tool addict, yeah, um, but he's, uh, he mentioned fast eddie and I guess fast eddie's goal is to have every discontinued park tool, like he's still working on his collection of every single discontinued one. So so if you talk to fast eddie, you got to tell him that willie says hi from guru bikes, so we get a.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I want to see this collection yeah there's going to be some cool stuff. I've talked to some interesting people. There's a there's a guy in canada and he collects all the gear t-shirts, hats, mechanics shirts so he has all these different generations of all of them, but he has like a stack of them that's cool he keeps them all.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):In a case, I've talked to another guy. He's got our wtks. It's a basically a roadside kit, so it's got a multi-tool in it, a chain tool, some tire levers, um, some cool little custom tools that were made just for those kits, and he's got every version of them, and that's one we don't have. We don't have a couple of the wtks that we had that we we made through the years, um, but yeah, a lot of yeah it's crazy what people, what people will collect like I, I collect pint glasses so I absolutely have a park tool, pint glass in my collection.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:You probably have a couple, so I absolutely have a Park Tool, pint glass in my collection. You probably have a couple. I think I just have one because I don't get into like every version, but I got like an XTR and I've got an Eddie McStiff which you can't buy from Moab, Like I've got a bunch of them. So, but yeah, that's mine. You don't even drink beer either.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I know which is crazy, which is funny.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Diet Pepsi in a pint glass works.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Did you know?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:they hold other things other than beer.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:No, I didn't know that.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And they hold a pint of it.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I've learned something new today. Hey Truman, how do you think bike maintenance has changed over the years? Bikes are changing. How does that impact the maintenance and how does that impact you guys?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It's a great question. It has changed changed, in my opinion, quite a lot. I think that bike maintenance has become a lot more diverse. There's a lot more things that bike mechanics need to keep track of. Compatibility has escalated significantly. Um, and and it's it's been really interesting. The suspension has become a much bigger thing. The servicing suspension has become a lot more popular. The the details are a lot more important on these newer group sets you know very small adjustments make a big difference.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):You know very small adjustments make a big difference. Um, it has affected us in some ways. It's hard to keep up with all of the new stuff that comes out, the innovation, and then it's also hard to to justify doing everything for every new thing that comes out.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And so it's hard to kind of make make up your mind on what what you're going to do to support, because you kind of have to put your eggs in their basket too. You're also saying like, okay, there's a new part on the market and it requires a new tool. Or there's a new now e-bike drivetrains and stuff and mid-drives and all these lock rings and bottom bracket tools. You've got to look at it and you're like, okay, this company. You look at the product and you look at the company and you are like, okay, how many are they going to sell? How many can we sell, and how much of that is a support piece to the industry? Cause there's some of there's part of that in us.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):We were like, well, we want to, even if we don't think it's really going to be worth it our time, as, as far as like money-making goes, it might be worth it for us to make it just as a support to the industry, so that people have the tool and they have access to it, cause that's a big one. When people come to us they want. The biggest reason that they come to us is that everybody has access. Lots of distributors carry our stuff, lots of online retailers Almost it's almost across the globe. You know we sell in 80 different countries. You can buy our stuff all over the place, but yeah, new stuff coming out all the time. You notice our tools change part numbers slightly frequently.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You know, it's interesting when I truly, when I was thinking about this podcast, I originally was like, oh, this is good when standards change, that's gotta be a good thing for park, cause they get to make a new tool and sell a new tool, and then I started thinking about.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:you got to do molds and tooling and all the shit to make the tool, and now you're splitting your sales. You know 50% and you got the investment, and so actually it may not be a good thing. It's better to sell a hundred of something you already tooled up for and I say tooled up like in the manufacturing perspective, right, versus. Now you got to create all new stuff and then you don't know, is that standard actually going to stick to your point man? So it's complicated, right, and you have some loss leading parts. You know some tools or you guys call them servicing the industry, right that you guys may not be making money on, but you do it just as a you know, just as a benefit to the industry.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:What's something like that.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Is there an example of a loss leading tool for you guys, or a?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I don't know.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Maybe you don't want to talk about it.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I don't know if we truly have any loss leaders, what I would call a loss leader.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):When I think of a loss leader, I think of Dyson headphones, like $1,000 headphones that have weird circulation in them, that nobody's going to buy it, but somebody made them and they're going to sell them for a bazillion dollars yeah, I think some of the stuff that you know, like facing tools, those are stuff where the quantities are extremely low and so it's hard to have inventory and it's hard to forecast ordering and stuff like that but it's really important for the people who need them. But they're also really expensive. So when you sell one you make a chunk of money on each one. But you know we also sell. We sell a traditional, we have a fairly traditional distribution channel. So we're selling to a distributor. Distributor selling to a shop, so we're selling to a distributor. Distributor selling to a shop, shop is selling to a consumer and everybody along the way gets to make some money.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And it's so it makes. So you know, even though it looks like it's really expensive, we probably didn't actually make a ton of money and but yeah, those would probably be the number one kind of service to the industry stuff.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So you guys sell. You guys sell to bike shops, you guys sell consumer direct off your website.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So we don't sell it. We don't sell direct to bike shops at all.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:No, you sell to distributors who sell to bike shops.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, so we distribute is sell to bike shops, and then we do sell directly from our website. And that was a I when I shops and then we do sell directly from our website. And that was a I when that would happen right when I started and I thought it was a big deal. It's coming right out of a bike shop. I'm like you're cutting the bike shop out, but I a lot of bike shops.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Um, you can't carry everything, yeah carry everything you could get all the park tools at your shop that I buy online. Is that true?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:yeah, so, uh, yeah, we, we have access to all of them through the distributor. I was kind of surprised because I've opened, uh, so this bike shop that we have, we opened two years ago, yeah, um, but the shop before that was 10 years ago, and each time when I was stocking the shop with tools I wanted to call park and say, hey, can we get a bike shop?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:you know kit, you shop kit or something, and the response was go through your distributor. And it was kind of weird. I didn't quite understand it. I do like the traditional supply chain because that is something that kind of gives you consistency. Also, they can make 100 of something and if they have to sell that a hundred to a hundred different people it's tough. It's a lot more work than if they sell a hundred of them to one distributor. Yeah, and then that distributor is already selling it, and then the bike shop's selling yeah, um so it makes sense to an extent.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Um, but yeah, I was kind of surprised that we couldn't buy direct from them and you can, and um, oh man, what was I gonna say?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:hey, do you have any idea? You probably don't, based on your distribution model, but I was. What I was trying to figure out is like, what percentage of your parts go to guys like me home mechanics and what percentage of your parts go to guys like him the bike shop owner? Do you have any idea of the data? That, because your distribution a very, very loose idea.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Um, and it's probably going to be surprising, but I'm going to. I I kind of remember what I was going to talk about.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Um, one of the difficult parts, you know. So we also get hit up. So bike shops want to buy from us and then also bike shop employees want to get discounts from us. And it's a difficult conversation because I'm right there with everybody. I want to get a discount on stuff too, because I'm in the industry and a lot of people in the industry don't make a lot of money. Part of being in the industry is it's a passion. You're not going to make a lot of money in this industry.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, yeah. And so the discounts are part of this. Really the sweet spot. Bike tools are a little bit of an interesting thing because the bike shop is our major customer. They are the customer they are. When we started it was, we were selling only to bike shops, so having distributors was really crucial. And now the bike shop employee wanting a discount. It's like, well, there's a reason for the discounts from, like, a bike manufacturer or a component manufacturer. You get a bike shop employee onto a component or a bike or a frame or something and they really fall in love with it.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):they're going to sell that or a bike or a frame or something and they really fall in love with it. They're going to sell that when you are just really loving your tools. But you're not selling a bunch of them. It's really just for you and it benefits you to have the tools. So it is a difficult conversation and it was really took me a long time to kind of wrap my head around it, but now I kind of of understand it more. It is a little bit of a different business than most bicycle component or frame or bike companies, right?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:um so. So the split between home mechanic, bike shop mechanic I would say it's more than 50 home users.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Wow wow, yeah that's crazy, I do you? Feel like that's been been a big. I feel like that's been a big change COVID?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:didn't COVID do that no.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I, I, I would say YouTube, youtube.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, I would say COVID, I would say it's probably maybe five, six years before COVID is kind of when that kind of started happening.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Maybe, maybe when that kind of Amazon, because when Amazon started getting strong, that's when we started getting a little bit more data on, because you can follow stuff a lot easier.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Um, we don't like amazon by the way don't say that too loud, man. This is space lasers.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I love you it's all good well.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I'll cut that part out. Keep going. Oh, that's okay, but yeah it's been interesting.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And then Amazon has created an interesting market. When, what was it? Probably 2020. I know it was 2020, just before COVID. We did a really big, we made a huge decision and I was not involved with it. Um, I don't know a ton about it, but I do know that we had like 120, 130, 140 resellers selling our stuff on Amazon and they would be buying it from distributors. But when you have that many people selling your goods, people start competing against each other and you're competing against each other with the same product, and so we basically we, we cold, and when I say cold, I mean we cold, going from like 120 to 140, somewhere in there to 10.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Wow.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And uh so. I mean that protects your pricing then, basically, well, it's a it's a pricing protection strategy, and the pricing protection strategy is crucial because it makes just a fair marketplace and so it keeps all of the online retailers happy.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It keeps the distributors happy and the distributors have a hard time because and cause they get caught up in the middle of it all and they, you know, they have a do not sell. They have a do not sell list from us that's this long, from people who are under selling our stuff for too little, and that's what happens. You know, we just shut off the you, we just shut off your supply chain. Um, and if we can't figure out who's selling it at this point, we've pretty much figured out right away. There's software figure out who's selling it At this point we've pretty much figured out right away.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:There's software, we know Damn there goes my park dumping park strategy business idea. I don't get that either.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Just kidding. So the biggest harm that I see that happens to companies is that it gives the consumer the idea that that product can be sold cheaper and that when they sell it at their regular price they're somehow ripping people off. And that's the. That's a big thing, you know.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:But let's be honest, man. I mean, let's just straight up like park tools are not expensive. They're not like crazy expensive. They're affordable. To begin with, I'm a cheap ass and I love park tools because I'm a cheap ass and their quality and buying quality for good prices is like that's my whole life.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Anytime you have anything, there's going to be somebody who tries to beat the price on it, I know, I know I hear you and they're going to either do it in a crappy way, which makes makes it look like your product, but not work.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:But I have. You know how I like to find deals on everything.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, how.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I like to find deals on everything. Yeah, I've never one time tried to go find a better price at a for a park tool, not a C of the 200 tools in my garage, and then when I bought off, I bought off your website directly from park. I've I've never been like this is. I should try to find a better deal on it. This is too expensive because they're reasonably priced for what I'm getting Truman, what do you? Think man.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I have a lot to say on that. But also, good luck and let me know what we find now. What's interesting is, it's the people who are dumping, and they know that people like companies like us are watching, and so they'll dump Sunday at 3 am. They'll go on eBay Sunday at 3 am and they'll post stuff for cheap 3am. They'll go on ebay sunday at 3am and they'll post stuff for cheap so if you're looking for a deal, sunday at 3am somewhere in there.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):You might see it for maybe 10 to 15 to 20 minutes, because they don't want to risk losing their supply chain um why would you even do it then blip yeah because in that time people have things loaded in their carts already and they're waiting for the prices to fluctuate, and so they get some like 10 sales, maybe out of it or something.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I don't.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I don't fully understand it, Um, but yeah, so what's fun is Pete? Um, our good friend Pete now. Pete used to be our customer service guy for a year and a half. He was, uh, he's been a long, longtime mechanic in the Twin Cities area and he was getting really frustrated with people calling or emailing or reading on forums or something about. Park tools are so expensive. You guys are the snap-on overpriced blah, blah, blah of the bike industry.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah yeah, do people really think that? I mean, if you're comparing it to like garbage that you can buy from china, it's not going to last, maybe.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:well, I think if you were to buy a park flathead screwdriver and then compare it to some flathead screwdriver, you could make some argument but the problem is there. It is.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:That's about it, yeah maybe I'm just a fan boy.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):This screwdriver versus a hardware store screwdriver, significantly different in price. But when you compare this screwdriver to its competition which people don't really understand because they just think it's a screwdriver when you compare it to its competition, it's pretty reasonable. So when you look for J at screwdrivers, you find Japanese companies, or you find japanese companies or you find german companies or somebody like that. And and our screwdriver is not jis, it's, it's a. It's halfway between the jis and the din standard do you know what that?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:means we find, yeah, I've got a set of jis out there and I've got a set of park out there, yeah that's a big deal and people don't know that.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah and uh, then they can't turn their limiters on their shimano trailer.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah and to the people who can't see, I'm holding up our uh dsd4. It's a cross-tip screwdriver and it has uh what would be a lot of people would consider a jis tip and jis versus phillips versus a. Those are all cross-tip screwdriver standards and Phillips is meant to cam out. At a certain amount of torque it's going to push out and it's going to strip. The JAS and the DIN standards both have more squared up edges and they can transfer a lot more torque and so they don't strip out. It doesn't cam out of there. It can actually sit and stick into a fitting and a lot of times ours doesn't, usually because of our handles are heavy and weighted and, have you know, I really like these handles. I use them for a lot of stuff in the prototyping process too, but the hollow ends. So these screwdrivers are amazing, but, yeah, the pricing, you know and but this compared. But we also have an inexpensive set of screwdrivers that are comparable to like a hardware store screwdriver set.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And that's when you know. So, pete, who I was talking about. He basically made a huge dock. He was really big in the spreadsheet. So he made a huge dock and basically looked at all the competition and pricing and basically is like, yeah, we are, we are basically right in the. We are either right in the middle on a product or we're towards the end and we have another product that we sell it's towards the bottom. So we're typically we typically have an option in every category that's either in the middle or at the bottom of the price point, and sometimes at the top of the price point.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It depends on what it is right because being at, you know, the top of the price point, um stuff, you know, like a headset press. We're kind of more towards the top of the price point on that one, but it's a lot bigger and heavier duty and there's more uh, like it's a better product.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:It's a better product than what you'd pay if you. So it's not apples to apples, you're not. It's not. You're not paying the same for the same product.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It's it's not apples to apples and if you look at the what people are able to use for a long period of time, you walk into a bike shop. They might have the first you know a bike shop that's 50 years old. They might have the first headset press they bought from us 50 years ago it's still going.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:It's still going yeah, and sometimes better. Sometimes better than the new stuff, right?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:well, because there was, remember, the old flat ones. They didn't have the indents. Uh. So the one of the some of the original headset presses didn't have an indent, they were just a flat and so um, so they wouldn't get weird. So the new ones have like kind of I don't know what you call it ridges on the inside so they fit the cups and they center, uh. And then I remember there was a couple headsets that we would deal with with the new ones, where they wouldn't sit quite right and the flat ones were better.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So yeah, you're looking for the flat ones? Yeah, well, they.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:You know, it just depends you know it depends on what you're doing, uh, but yeah, that's you'll, you'll. As a mechanic you notice those little differences. So, like he's talking about, you know what I call just generically phillips screwdrivers.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:A lot of people don't know there's different types of yeah, when he said crosshead, I'm like, yeah, I figured out, I figured out what you were talking about and I was like, oh man, is that something I don't know about?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:that's the guys that are like complaining because they're going to, you know, not even ace hardware harbor freight yeah and buying some screwdriver, that's three bucks you know two dollars or whatever.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, or it's interchangeable with a bunch of different heads and it won't quite fit, or, like he's talking about they're. They're actually designed to come out at a certain torque, so you don't you don't rip the heads off, and so. But the bike industry ones are a little different, because they're looking for precision and they're looking for turning and in more of a shallow area and some of your, some of the tools that you guys sell.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I have like the home mechanic version, maybe that's like the inexpensive version because I'm not going to do it like a, like a heads, like the headset press I have yeah it's not the bike shop version, right, it's not the super high-end one, but I don't do that many headset presses no, we used to use a board and like a hammer and how many people did it. Just for the record. We don't recommend that.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:No no, that's, true. Hey, I gotta be.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):The bmx industry is still really into the hammers and the wood.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Oh, yeah, so brackets, headsets, yup. Does park make a vice grip?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):We don't.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay, that's a good example of like that's what we want.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So that's why I call it a cross tip.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Cause.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Phillips is a is a is a type of cross tip screwdriver. It's a classification. Yeah, and you know, vice grips, that's a name of a uh brand that makes or but do they?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:does park make a vice grip style?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):uh, wrench, Uh, no, okay, so keep your eyes peeled maybe, and it might not be used for what you think it's it's not, it's.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I'll give you a little bit more to go on than that it's it's going to be basically based off of a vice grip mechanism, but it's for something different okay, because it's going to help some people and it's going to help shops on certain bikes that walk in the door, and it's going to be uh, it's going to take something that can be really frustrating or really hurt your thumbs, and it's going to make it a lot easier.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Oh, that's, I'm already into that. No, we used to joke that that our shop doesn't ever have vice grips. We don't have vice grips in the shop.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:The fuck do you need them for?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Well, you go to a BMX shop, there's guaranteed to be.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:There's going to be vice grips, hammers, pry bars.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I mean, we have hammers, but we don't have like claw hammers you know, I mean we have park hammers. It's like my favorite hammer, but but it's funny, cause there are some tools that we don't carry that I've seen in plenty of bike shops, so yeah, so, Dan you, you had a question about the new, no, the new stand, the new stand.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So maybe, maybe and believe it or not. Truman, we've already been talking for an hour and I have 700 more questions, so we're I'm not going to get. I'm not going to get all my questions out, but I want to make sure we cover your uh we haven't talked a lot about product and so I'd like to do a little bit.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So there's, um, our shop in particular. We were starting to do it. Uh, uh do a ton of e-bikes, and I've been shopping for e-bike stands. Most of the bike shops around town have them already. I'm kind of picky, Um, so I have two questions. One on the original e-bike park stand, it's got the black T at the top. What is that, and does it have to be there?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So the product is the PRS 33.2 is what it's currently called. Yeah, and it's an electric lift stand, so it's a has a carriage. I'm just kind of giving people an idea of what I'm talking about.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It is a carriage that can lift 120 pounds up and down and it goes from about two inches off the ground all the way to about seven feet off the ground that's the range of the clamp. And so the upright is a nice big round extruded piece of aluminum, very, very sturdy, and that is probably 6'11", maybe right at really close to seven feet. And the crossbar at the top it's actually blue, uh, the crossbar at the top is it has hooks that come on it and so, like you're doing a tune-up, you can hook a front wheel on the front, you can hook a back wheel on the back, otherwise it's there as a t-track. So it has a t-track on the bottom of it and that allows you to add accessories. We don't necessarily sell the accessories, but you might find a reason to mount an accessory, and I'll give you an example of that. Okay, so mondraker, I don't know who's, but they're, uh, the mountain bike brand, yep yeah, we talked to him this weekend actually, yeah, yeah at sedona.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So yeah, really cool looking bikes really really cool looking kind of edgy yeah, I would. I would kind of classify them, but they have. I think it's 90 now.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):They have 90 prs 33.2s in their manufacturing facility oh, wow and theirs are set up with monitors, so they mount their monitor to that t-track and then they mount uh like electrical uh plugs to the t-track that's on the upright right, and then they mount other stuff on the other t-track on the other side and that allows, and then they have a little computer module on the bottom and so then they have a wireless torque wrench that goes with that. You know, basically, um, as the person who's assembling the bike goes through it, they can go from the net. They press next on the screen and it changes the adjustment of the torque wrench and it records that they torqued the item that they were supposed to have torqued, or if there's three fasteners that need to be torqued to that value, at that point you need to click it three times on all three of those. So it's basically a QC process happening live as it's being assembled, and so they were able to use that T-track to put those on there.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I've also seen, yeah, all kinds of different stuff People do laptops, laptop holders, holders and articulating arms that are mounted off of the t-track, and that's what that's there for. That crossbar is just stuff to mount to hose reels whatever you want, can you run it without it?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):you can run it without it, okay all right.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So that was my first question. Go for it, okay. The second one is there's a new um. We call them e-bike lifts, but they're lift uh stands, so it don't have to be an e-bike. But you know, um, and we saw it on a couple online. You know reviewers. It's not out yet and it's basically got a hand crank, so it's not electric, but I saw somebody hook up a drill to it which makes it a lot faster.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I know so, so what when's that coming?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:You know, when do we get to see that? What's it? What's it? Yeah, tell us about it. Yeah, what's the story?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So this is a unique product. We don't we really try not to spill the beans before it's available.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):And so this is a unique situation, but we're we're pretty pumped about it and, uh, it's been well, well received. We showed it at Cabda. It's called the PRS dash 30. And it is a basically a mechanical lift. We have a? Um, we're going to have to come.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Sometimes in bike repair, which Calvin and I do, a lot of education stuff and sometimes we have to come up with terminology and then so in this case we have to maybe come up because we have three different classifications of stands. Now we basically have what my coworker, Andy, and I kind of came up with was we have a static option, or we have many static options, to be honest. Static option, which would be like our PRS-3 or our PRS-s2, now the 2.2 and 2.3 and 3.3. And then we have our electric lift, which is basically almost. It's not automated but it's a. You don't do any work, it lifts it for you 100 and you can lift it way up high, flip, flip it over and then whip it way down low, which is the way down low is really cool about the 33 because, like with an e-bike, you can take, put the e-bike in there and and flip the e-bike over, drive it to the bottom, lift your motor unit out if you need to do some kind of service like that. So that's really cool where you can work upside down and it's right in your face, okay, um, so that's pretty cool.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):But the new one, the prs 30 30, it kind of falls in the middle of those.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It's a a manual lift, I think what we're going to be calling it, and it comes with a hand crank and every five cranks gets you one inch of travel and but that hand crank is mounted on a 10 millimeter hex so you can just hook up a 10 millimeter socket with a drill of your choice and that thing just rips down and rips up.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):It has a soft stop at the bottom, so you're not going to rip your hand off. When you get to the end of the travel it drives itself off of the track at the top and so you're not going to rip your hand off at the top. As 120 pound weight capacity and it has two, the clamp can be mounted in two positions. Um, and I don't know the I can't recall the exact numbers on where they start Um, but you know, basically it has about 26 ish inches of travel, so you can lift it basically 26 inches and with the drill you can be faster than a 33. And you can lift just as much and it is fully serviceable. It can take the whole thing apart in your shop.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You can replace all the Damn you for introducing me to this.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I'm so excited, so I think some people are.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I'm looking at it, I'm looking at a picture of it right now on bike radar.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So some people are saying this may be a home version of but they say it's for shop use as well, right?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Well, yeah, absolutely, you know. But I'm excited and and here's the weird little feedback I can give you, which is a little bit our, um, our workshop is, uh, open kitchen style, we're right out in front of everybody, and so I don't like the look of the, of the big one. I, you know the guys are wanting one, they're finally getting to where they want one and I don't like how big it is. It blocks a lot of the look of the shop and in the back room of shops.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Who cares? That's a unique thing for your shop exactly, and so I saw this thing and I'm like. It looks like our regular stands, does the function that we want, and I love the fact that the electronics are not integrated like we can one. You can use it as a regular stand so you don't have to have this big, bulky thing in there. If you're never really using it which is my fear the guys just won't use it. They'll just lift the bikes. But this way it's got the crank or we can put a little drill on there.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:All right, the obvious question, and you probably don't have the answer or you don't want to answer.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Do you guys have pricing on this thing. Yet Pricing or when it's available.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, we've got someing on that thing. Yeah, yeah, I know one of the. I guess I know one crucial price that I can tell you guys about. So this stand is going to be available in two variants, okay. So one is going to be more focused for shop people and it's going to be a. It's going to be just the upright and a clamp. That's what it's going to be.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So it's got the four hole base that you can bolt down to your.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, so if you have an existing base, you can bolt it right onto that base. Otherwise you can buy another base and that weighted base. As you know, it's a lot easier to work on a bike when you have a large ballast at the bottom of it. So if you're working on bikes all day, you're going to be available with legs. And the one with legs it's a lot lighter, and when I mean legs, there are legs that are about 90 degrees from each other, kind of like a portable stand, like a PCS 10.3 or a PRS 25, something along those lines. Those legs stick out and it's going to be lighter weight and it's going to have wheels.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:And it's going to be lighter weight and it's going to have wheels kind of more intended for a home user, which we see a lot of Hold on one sec.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):People just want to be able to lift a lot.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay, you're good, go ahead. Sorry, we had a little technical difficulty.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah, so you were talking about the legs, yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah, so the one that's going to be available legs. It's going to have wheels on the back of it so you can tilt it back and wheel it around your garage and put it in a corner or wherever you want.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Nice.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):So the one with the wheels on it is going to retail somewhere in the very, very, very likely $899. Okay, which is in the mix, very much in the mix, for stands like this, for all the bike shop people out there. There's going to be different pricing for bike shops, sure, which a lot of say the competition in this segment don't have that as much. So it's going to be the price is very good. I will say that for what you get and the serviceability is really good and what you're saying is exactly what we heard from Capita. People really like understanding how things work, the ability to service it, the ability to, you know, not have a very large thing in your, in your hair area. Some people, really some people are after that they want this statement, this professionalism statement of the stand, but some people don't. And then some people don't have the space. It's a big stand, so we have a video about how to cut it down to a shorter height and, um, it's. It's a different animal too. The 33 has.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):There's other electric lifts in the world. There's a lot of them in Europe. Ours has some unique features that not a lot of them have. Ours is on the higher end of the weight ratings Ours, the biggest one probably is it has two. You have two sides. It comes as a single-sided option but you can get the second side for it, where a lot of them don't have that second side. And when you're looking into your and you're looking at your space and you have to fit two of these big ones in there, that's a lot of space.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):But if you can use two stands off the same upright, that's a big deal. Um, so that, and then it's very simple to fix. And the 33 is it's it's very, very simple as well. Um, I have kind of become one of the more I've become kind of the go-to guy for repairing that. I have a lot of understanding of how the inner workings were and how to diagnose it and it's a very simple system. Um, I guess I would kind of relate the electronics to um, I've got two kids. It's kind of like a ride on car.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay, it's very similar.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):The go button is the pedal, the the other button, the directional button is the pedal. The other button, the directional button is the shifter Forward, reverse, and that tells a motor to go one way or go the other and then the carriage climbs up a chain or descends a chain. It's a very, very simple thing. It's not something where it's hiding a lot of what's going on, which is what kind of happens with a lot of them.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I like the USB ports on it. I like that because you don't have a USB strung across in front of your bench where you're yanking computers off the table or anything like that. So I do like that. Like you were talking about attaching things to the carriage or the what do you call it? The, t, the.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:T bar T bar, yeah, and having a laptop on there for for doing diagnostics. Cause that's the the new. The new frontier for bikes right now is we're going to be hooking them up to computers a lot we already are, you know, and so I kind of like that integration. But then you got to deal with putting wire, you know wiring it and putting power to it and stuff. So, yeah, well, truman, like, like we said, we have probably 500 more questions for you.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah, this is like yeah, we could talk for hours, for hours. Yeah, let's, let's close with this. Like, what are you most excited about? Uh, for parks, future? Like what are you super excited about it's coming out? Or just in general, like what are your thoughts?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Like, what are you super excited about it's coming out? Or just in general, like what are your thoughts? Oh man, that is a great loaded question. Oh man, I am excited.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I mean you can feel free to drop some secrets here too, if you want.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I wish I could. I don't necessarily there's some exciting stuff coming. I wish I could. I don't necessarily there's some exciting stuff coming. We talked about some stuff in this episode and there's some new versions of them coming, not recently, not this recent stuff that we were talking about, but there's some other stuff that we were talking about. There's an updated version to something that's been the same for decades and it's going to be exciting and what I'm most excited about I'm I'm just really really excited to see. I don't know, sorry man.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:No, no, no, worries whatsoever.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I guess a better way to put that is when you do this job like what's the best part of your job, like like what is the best part of being Truman at park?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:What's the best?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:part yeah, what makes you?
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):go to work every day. I love, love seeing come. I love seeing something go from a block of aluminum to a new idea or from some raw material to an an idea. That's one of my favorite parts of the process. I love that part that that prop, the prototyping part of it, and that's my favorite part of the process and that's why I? Get, I get really, I get the. You know some people maybe one person would call it the fizz.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):I get the fizz from that that makes me really happy when like you, you take something and you create, um, because at the bike shop, you like you change the, the fork cap. Yeah, yeah, that was me. You're always making stuff work for you, work in your environment, work on what you're working on changing stuff, and when you're creating it from the ground up, you get to just kind of create exactly what you want, and that's that's what makes me most excited in in in my role.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Well, that's cool man. Well, thank you so much, truman. We really appreciate your time, you know, for our listeners. You know, park tools website out there, uh, just fantastic uh. Youtube channel, as a matter of fact, that's what's enabled me to kind of like get the skills You've. You're, you're kind of like my own private little bike mechanic school that. I've probably watched every one of your videos. I wait for them to come out and I watch them and even if it's like for some road bike thing, I still watch it.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Um, and you guys are hilarious, yeah, and you're doing a great job man, it's cool to see you come.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:He's been Calvin forever. But you, but you know, recently you've, you've come on and you've got, you've got a great vibe and and a great uh, uh, I don't know what's it called Like camera, camera, camera. Uh, persona, um and and you guys put things really simply you don't make it too long. I really liked that when you introduce a new product, you got like a two minute video out there. That just gives me what I need to know. I'm, I'm in love with you guys.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Um, that's weird, but uh, maybe we dwell on the videos for a little bit and what all of those things that you mentioned. We put a ton of time into that. It takes a lot of takes a lot of time to not make a long video. Yeah, it's easy. How long have we been talking?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, yeah, hour 17.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Hour and 17 minutes yeah.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Calvin and I can talk forever about any topic.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):But what's really difficult is trying to keep it in a short compact. You need to know what you need to know and some people really just want they just want to jump in and you to show them exactly how to do it. But what people don't understand is that there's a lot of different versions of things out there. There's a lot of different standards. So you have to kind of set this groundwork and put down all of these, like how it works, so that people can see that these different things, even though they look different, they work the same. And then you have to um, go through it and use words and use language that both speak to a beginner and an expert, because experts need to be. They need little reminders here and there.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Or I love watching people work on bikes because it's how you hold your hand, it's just it's, it's or just oh, that's a little genius, little tip, it's all the little things. And so you go through and so it's hard to not be. You know, either you're going to be kind of snooty or condescending, or and you really try to not be those and you want to give people exactly what they need in the most efficient way possible, but sometimes efficient takes 10, 15 minutes and for some people that's way too long. Some people they want to know way more and they end up in my email box well, I think you got it like when, you got it like just right that's what I think, so what you guys are doing it's working for me, so appreciate it.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah, truman, thanks a lot, brother. Have a great night, man.
Truman Purdy (Park Tools):Yeah thanks dane and thanks josh for having me really good. Have a good time. Yeah, thank you.
