All Ball Bearings Nowadays

One advantage to simultaneously working forty-two different jobs within the bike industry is the connections you get to make. Not just between people, but between ideas. At this point I have a different hand in retail; wholesale and manufacturing; design and engineering; and media and journalism. Actually, some of those are feet, maybe a nose, and an ear. It’s quite the game of Twister I have going on.

But that degree of “fly vision” I have lately–a weird kind of 360-degree view of how things are working–makes wearing the many hats pretty interesting. I might notice a cause one place, the effect in another. On the surface, none of the things I’m doing seem to have anything to do with one another, but the patchwork starts to make sense when I step back from it, and you can really see trends and movements. One day I may even be able to see the imaginary construct that is the bike industry as all Neo-green ones and zeros.

One of the intersections I have going on right now involves organizing product categories, writing product copy, and thinking about current “standards” for frame bottom-brackets and head tubes, and the more I look at each of these things, the more I realize something about where we’re headed as an industry.

Standards are going away.

I mean that literally, mechanically-speaking, not as a kind of moral judgment (though there are definitely some shady characters in the business). From a design standpoint, I think we’re approaching a time when each bike is going to be its own unique animal, with fewer and fewer options for swapping parts between bikes. We’re talking about the extreme extension of “system engineering” here, and depending on your perspective, that’s either the key to having the strongest, lightest bikes possible, or a hell unlike any of us have ever experienced.

It all starts with ball bearings. Consider how ridiculous it would be if companies manufacturing full-suspension bikes had to buy their pivot bearings from SRAM or Shimano. So why do they bother buying headsets and bottom brackets? For now there’s still an advantage to letting somebody else worry about making those, but the window on that seems to be closing. Poor Cane Creek and Chris King make about 700 variations of internal, external, zero-stack, straight, tapered, mix-tapered and holographically chamfered headsets, but none of them fit a Ridley, because why the hell shouldn’t Ridley just make their own even more ginormous diameter lower bearing? Carbon fiber has largely changed the way we think about bicycle frames: if you’re spending the money on a mold anyway, why not just have it include almost everything you need–everything but the bearings themselves?

And even if you don’t make your own headsets and bottom-brackets, what’s really left to engineer and market about a Press-fit 30? How different can one brand’s BB30 be from another’s? About all you can do is release a ceramic bearing option–the headset and bottom-bracket manufacturer’s version of adding another child to a sitcom family.

It’ll all start with the ball bearings. Everything else will take a while, but try to think of a component a bike manufacturer hasn’t yet tried to make.

Disc brakes? Remember AMP? Any poor Coda owners still out there?

Crankset? That design Specialized bought from the recumbent company seems to be working out just fine for them.

Stems, bars, saddles, seatposts and tires? Bontrager.

Suspension fork? Cannondale banged their head against that wall until it finally cracked (ambiguity there’s entirely intentional so’s to appeal to both fans of Lefty forks and to the detractors, but you have to admit, they’re here to stay). Even Specialized keeps wrapping Fox and RockShox guts in their own shells, and that’s exactly how proprietary is going to happen. You won’t see Fox and Shimano going out of business. Your shit just won’t be able to move from one bike to another any more.

And maybe that’s not such a big deal. You don’t buy a Honda CRF frame and then build it into a full bike (well, most of us don’t, anyway). But the key is that this stuff has to work. If system-engineering proprietary parts are where we’re headed, there should be a noticeable advantage in things like performance and durability. Look at what Santa Cruz did for suspension pivots. They redesigned the shit out of an otherwise standard issue generic bearing, but the result was way better pivots, so nobody’s bitching (or if they are, they should take Santa Cruz up on the free replacement offer).

It’s all ball bearings nowadays. Let’s hope that if proprietary happens, it actually makes life better. Jury is still very much out on that one.