13 Apr 2011

It goes without saying that pro road cycling is the bastion of the bike companies that have more in common with Kmart than they do those of us peddling handmade custom bikes, and Paris - Roubaix is no different. However, one thing that the PR is, is a great litmus test for products and ideas - a place where you’ll see Cyclocross bikes, Aluminium parts chosen instead of Carbon, and magazine editors uttering the words “Massive” and “27mm” in the same sentence. Also the place of course where you’ll see a certain brand of headset saw a certain riders’ fork steerer in two before they prudently finally sign a licensing agreement for the proper design. Nervous days for designers.

So what’s the message for the custom bike industry? What can we learn from the Dark Side?

Well, the big thing I think is the effectiveness of the non-traditional road bike. While it’s true that the average customer of ours isn’t riding cobbles all day, it just takes one patch of crap road to know that things could be shall we say a tad more comfy. 23mm tyres, thin handlebars, and 400mm chainstays when you be perfectly honest with yourself, don’t really scream ‘enjoyment’ - especially if you’re not smashing out 500km+ weeks. I honestly think the average road cyclist - and by that I mean 85% of ours and everyone elses customers - could do with a serious rethink when it comes to the approach to design, but also the ignoring of a paradigm that really has very little basis to it except that of the inertia of history (well, not exactly) and manufacturing efficiency.

We’re still inextricably caught up in the “Shorter is better, ‘Compact’ is better than, um, ‘Not Compact” Kool-Aid (as the Yanks like to say, and I like to say because it’s more G rated than our version) that was thrust upon the unsuspecting bike rider and sold as “Faster! Shorter! Stiffer! Better!” firstly by the Italian builders and then by the likes of Giant in the early 90’s with their “Three sizes fits nobody” marketing brilliance. We need to further break that meaningless paradigm I think, and embrace things like the Cyclocross bike for more than just ‘Cross, espouse the joy that is 25 and 28mm tyres, and make bikes that are more cruisey and less ‘racy’. Heck, we even need to be making bikes that actually ARE more racy and not just appear racy when viewed through the current backward looking kaleidoscope. That would probably start with not being emotive when referring to geometry with meaningless terms such as ’slack’ or ‘laid-back’, which are ridiculous. Maybe a 72 degree head angle is just, “right” or “appropriate”? With a 50mm raked fork, it’s certainly no less ‘racy’ than 73/43. Maybe if you need 90mm of saddle setback, you need longer chainstays than someone with 75? Is that less racy, or able to be raced? Not even slightly. How about the ability to take your road bike on a weekend or rail-trail riding with freinds, just by switching over to 32mm tyres? Certainly worth the trade off if the only racing you’re doing is a run down Beach Rd once a week with a pack of idiots enthusiasts.

Posted by warwick @ 4:10 am

06 Apr 2011

I’m not really sure what exactly the product managers at the major Steel tubing companies do every day, but for about a decade now there have been some glaring holes in the steel tubing catalogs of all the major manufacturers. Combined with the fact that recent trends are largely being ignored, it makes you wonder whether most of them just want to clear existing inventory and go do something more profitable, or with something like the re-release of Columbus Max and Mini-Max, keep us all ‘retro’.

If I had the resources, I’d jump on the opportunity to just get tubes made to exactly the specifications I’d want, but as I don’t, I thought I’d write a list for the product managers out there so they’d have something to do. Here we go….

1. Tapered headtubes.

I’m not talking about the machined type like PMW are making, I’m talking about simple, taper-swaged designs.  As 1.5″ lower fork assemblies take root in pretty much all arenas of frame design, we need headtubes to cater for this or we’ll miss the boat. Machined headtubes are too expensive and too heavy for road frames, so what we need is a really simple headtube, with 1-1/8th at the top, 1-1/2 at the bottom, and a short taper of about 50-75mm inbetween. I.0mm wall should do just fine. Even 44mm at the bottom would probably be a better option because you could either run a 44mm ‘Inset’ style headset, or a 44XX 1.5 external at the bottom, keeping options open.

2. Tapered tubes.

If you have a 29.4 bulge butted seat tube, and a 36mm head tube, it makes no sense joining the two with a 31.8 top tube. What would be super nice is a 34.9>28.6 top tube so nothing has to be squished.  You could compliment this with a lighter 31.8>28.6 design.

3. Ovalised tubes.

Designers in other materials have realised that ovalised tubes in the right areas can add some vertical compliance, so another nice design would be a top tube that’s ø31.8 round taper to a 31.8 (horiz) x 25.4 (vert) oval.

4. Triple butted tubes.

One of my major irks is the lack these days of triple butted tubes. The classic location for where this design would work a treat is the downtube, where all the major forces are at the head tube end, not the BB end.  Having an MTB 0.9/0.6/0.9 walled downtube is a waste of time - a 0.9/0.6/0.7 design would be lighter, probably stronger, and just plain betterer. Put material where the loads are.

5. Oversize seat tubes.

There is only one readily available external bulge-butted ø31.8 dedicated seat tube (from Reynolds) but it’s a bit of a pig. I’ve had some samples from ECO in Taiwan which are pretty much exactly what is needed, but they’re impossible to get without MOQ’s beyond my measely output.  Someone needs to make these readily available because they really are what’s needed for MTB’s that have a ton of seatpost hanging out.

Plus the 29.4 Thomson seatpost is 44g lighter than the 27.2 one anyway, so why bother with it?

6. ø22.2 chainstays.

I’m a fan of Pegoretti-esque chainstays, but there are very few nice ø22.2 tubes available.

Posted by warwick @ 1:49 am

03 Apr 2011

I kinda want to set the record straight about my views on the custom bike industry. There’s a big group of people who understand where I’m coming from and what my views actually are, but there’s also apparently a group that doesn’t.

At the risk of sounding however I sound when typing on the Intarweb, I want to dismiss without reservation that I’m here to ‘dis’ the industry or think it’s crap. The glaring disparity with that view is, well, that’s where I get my frames made. Despite what my wife may think sometimes, I’m a pretty smart guy, so it wouldn’t really make much sense to wholesale slag off an entire industry whilst being dependent on said industry. I mean, the idea of setting fire to bridges is a good one, but shall we say, fundamentally flawed.

Speaking of flaws, one of my own favourite personality ones is that I’m not the most positive, saccharine and upbeat fellow, so I tend to be unnaturally attracted to negatives. I just love a good stouch and I just can’t help myself, so whenever I come across things I thing are wrong or stupid or are broken, I tend to be a little bit like a dog with a bone.

So, because of that, I tend to be outspoken about industry issues - as you can probably tell from my last few blog posts. It’s not because I ‘hate’ the industry, it’s because I actually want it to be better. When I have a shit time within it, or get burned, or see some glaring issue, I want to talk about it so it can be fixed, or others can avoid the same problems. So much for my negativity, ay?

I also fully understand that I’m not in the best position to exactly being a whistleblower. I’m a bit player who sells 30 frames a year. I’m in Australia, everyone else is in the US. I don’t make Thylacines, but the majority of custom framebuilders do make their own brand exclusively. It’s one thing when Mike Zanconato says “I’m not so sure about NAHBS I think it needs some changes” and another thing when I do. However, there’s also an upside to my position that is largely ignored - I’m an outsider looking in.

To be completely frank, almost everyone I know who has a job as a paid professional wonder why I bother with the custom bike industry. Not a single colleague of mine isn’t shocked when I tell them that the only trade show that promotes the industry globally is run by an autocrat and that the show has no mission statement nor selection criteria. Not a single colleague of mine isn’t shocked when I tell them a big label New England framebuilder builds three frames for us that break in exactly the same place despite the frames being different designs and calls it a non-warranty issue because it’s a ‘design flaw’. I’ve had more problems than probably anybody and cleaned up more of other people’s mess than I ever wish I’d ever have to, yet 10 years later here I still am, a passionate believer in custom bikes and the custom bike industry. If that’s not a passionate belief, go talk to my accountant.

As a ‘non-framebuilder’ coming from the Industrial Design arena, that fact alone throws things into stark contrast. For example, I see blown out leadtimes as a simple management and resources issue, whereas the framebuilding industry continues to see it as a tool to falsely promote an air of success as well as ensure a perceived extended revenue stream. I make comments based on the comments of others about the lack of branding and effective brand communication, and I get lambasted for making the comments despite the fact that because of my background I know 100 times as much as the average framebuilder who only spends a fleeting moment considering how what he does is perceived by the buying public? If you were a framebuilder, wouldn’t you think this was supremely important and something you should learn about?

The learning stream works both ways. I recently had a frame checked out by Ewen Gellie and in an afternoon learned a lot about alignment, fixturing and the penchant we both seem to have about making weird things work. Every time I get a frame done buy one of our new guys, Erik Rolf, I learn something new about how professional and engaging the designer/builder relationship can be. It could however be argued that the learning from me stops when it actually comes to me making frames myself, and I’d have a tough time arguing against that. I think I can safely say though that after having done almost every step in the process of building a bike frame, just never one after the other, that I’ve never had the desire to make a frame from start to finish. I got my first custom frame built in 1989 by Glenn Roache and nothing has really changed since then. I’m still unsure as to whether that’s a good or bad thing, but the fact remains that it’s not a detriment to everything else that I do, whereas conversely if you’re a framebuilder and you ignore the basic tenets of brand building and visual communication, you’re stuffed. Build it, and they won’t come. Darren Baum once said to me without a hint of irony “In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter how things looked” with a larger dose of irony considering I’m the guy who came up with his initial branding, designed his headbadge, and now his bikes carry a very strong evolved branding. Despite the fact that he is one of the best framebuilders in the world, without learning what he needed to do in terms of branding, he’d still be the guy with one lonely yellow frame hanging from John Kennedy’s racks. I think he would agree with me.

One of the natural defensive reactions to any ‘whistleblower’ is “Well, you’re not so great yourself” or “If you don’t like it , you do it”, (or my favourite - “If you don’t like it, leave”) but these are just that - defensive reactions. There’s no real point to being self righteous and defensive, you have to move beyond that and investigate for yourself. Like many framebuilders, I myself as a non-framebuilder have a tendency to exist in a vacuum, further isolated by circumstance, geography, and the way I’ve chosen to do things, but I think I can honestly say that I’m not so insular and self-absorbed that I don’t take people’s advise. I certainly don’t jump down people’s throats if they have an alternative view to myself - I do this thing called research and then evaluate. Passionate debate soon thereafter.

A good example of this is a good friend of mine is in marketing and much more well versed in ways to promote things than I am, once said to me I should drop the stripes that adorn the top tubes of my frames because they’re too polarising. Of course he’s completely right, and further exacerbating the problem is I change the design every other year just simply because I get bored. I’m completely aware of this, but I was also completely aware he wasn’t having a dig for the sake of it. I took his advise and now allow frames to be shipped out without the stripes - and in fact the two latest models, the Tephra XS and XK - don’t even have the stripes as part of their design. Deliberately. Of course, as soon as you do that people like the stripes, so you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t - ‘Such is Life’.

And speaking of damned, I’m probably less comfortable now with my self imposed and enforced marginalism than I was 3 years ago. Thylacine Cycles has always been a completely selfish endevour. I’ve never compromised on anything because it was really a single minded tool for me to do whatever the hell I liked. There’s no ‘Plan’ of any description - I literally just follow ideas I think are cool, and do things within my capacity that I think are better. It’s a complete, self-indulgence that is admittedly a reaction to my career as a Product Designer where literally for 15 years, I felt that good ideas were being put on countless backburners largely because people were afraid of risks and afraid to make decisions. ‘Publish or Perish’ is the mantra in Publishing, but in the Design field when you come up with a concept you think is 100 degrees of awesome, you want to see it out there - not bought and just put on the shelf.

Over the years there’s been dozen such ideas which you get paid well for, but go nowhere. A 600g XC disc front wheel, (Prototyped, tested) XC stem with ‘gasp’ four M5 bolts holding the thing together (Nitto said it was ‘unsafe’), one-bolt seatposts designs, large carcass / small knob tyres, a brilliant Manga-style advertising campaign for a certain brand of tyres that went to print only once. In Japan. A litany of IP thrown into the ‘too hard’ basket, and as a Designer that can only happen so many times before you throw up your hands. Thylacine Cycles is my therapy.

However, therein lies the rub. Everyone want’s to be successful, but sometimes that success is reliant on you compromising, and Thylacine was never set up for that. I’m utterly reliant on quality contract framebuilders, yet here I am defending ‘what my opinion is’ on the framebuilding industry when I thought it should be patently obvious. In many ways, my fun little toy is getting a lot more complicated than it ever has been.

Anyway, this is starting to sound like a novella so I might just wind it up here for now. Dear reader if you get nothing out of this except “Custom frames and framebuilders are cool, but like everything there is room for improvement and we should talk about it like grown-ups” then I think I can chalk this up as a ‘win’.

Hopefully even if the message does come from a loud-mouthed, marginalised, smarmy-pants designer type guy on a quest of fully aware self indulgence. And shit-stirring.

Posted by warwick @ 8:34 am