29er – CanooterValve

Talking vs. Doing: Business and the Ibis Ripley Suspension Design

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Dec 142011

Maybe it’s information overload or just the campaign season blues, but lately I seem even more sensitive than usual to the constant presence of bullshit. Certainly the world of business seems carved from a solid block of it these days. Examples of “synergizing your dynamism” are everywhere, but it really pisses me off to be reading an otherwise good article only to see if slowly devolving into random spew.

A key aspect of LinkedIn seems to be keeping us all connected, not only to each other, but also to a steady parade of articles with interesting-looking titles that often have little or no value. Consider this otherwise interesting article “Five New Management Metrics You Need to Know” LinkedIn directed me to at Forbes. Overall, there’s some kernel of value in an article about more practical ways to monitor business health and performance, outside of just reviewing sales numbers, but this train comes off the track more than once. Written by Greylock Partners venture firm guy James Slavet, whose firm invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Pandora, it becomes pretty obvious just how disconnected some of these people are from the daily functions of actual small business in America. Some of the article seems so rooted in bean bag chair Silicon Valley work-play as to be nonsensical to even the most ephemeral of businesses models–like “Metric 3: Meeting Promoter Score,” the idea that meetings should be evaluated to determine if they’re effective and worthwhile or not.

Most meetings suck. And they’re expensive: a one-hour meeting of six software engineers costs $1,000 at least. People who don’t have the authority to buy paperclips are allowed to call meetings every day that cost far more than that. Nobody tracks whether meetings are useful, or how they could get better. And all you have to do is ask.”

Gee, really? I guess my open mic meeting policy, where anyone could come in off the street and gather my key staff to talk about Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs wasn’t the right way to do it. Thanks for clearing that up.

Certainly there are businesses in the world that allow idiots to call meetings that go nowhere, but do you really need to fill out a questionnaire afterward for management to realize the meeting was useless? If so, then this amazing common sense insight will be discarded anyway, because the manager is the idiot calling the unproductive meetings.

Then there’s this insightful observation about criticism and reward, or something, explained with a highly insightful analogy to marriage,

You can learn as much from John Gottman as you can from John F. Kennedy about being a great communicator. Gottman, a psychologist, is the author of “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail”.

In his research, he found that marriages that succeed tend to have five times as many positive interactions as negative ones. And when a couple falls below that ratio, their relationship falls down too.

The same is true at the office, where you’re often connected for years in relationships with people who can either become wary of your criticisms or eager to give you their best effort. Catch people doing good things. Never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly. Then when you have feedback on areas to improve, they‘ll really listen. It may be hard to manage to the 5:1 ratio at the office, but you should be mindful of the balance.”

First, having not read John Gottman, I have to hope he was somehow taken out of context here, though it’s hard to imagine how. So marriage partners who have more positive interactions tend to have better marriages? That’s some profound shit. Someone needs to tell the couples on the television show “Cops” that their marriages are in jeopardy.

And you’re supposed to “never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly.” Clearly someone needs to introduce Mr. Slavet to the term “patronizing,” which could have saved him a half dozen words, at least, thus increasing his productivity. Obviously, he’s not suggested being disingenuous, but glib shit like this dances over the actual work of management, which involves reading people and interacting with them honestly. This suggests a kind of golden mean ratio of compliments to criticisms, and adhering to that strictly would be as bad as administering only compliments or only criticism.

I made plenty of management mistakes running my own business, but if there’s one thing I did very right it was cultivate fierce loyalty, and I didn’t do it by telling people their hair looked nice.

In other business news more related to “doing” than “talking,” I think everyone who rides a mountain bike should try to design a bicycle suspension system. For one thing, you’ve probably done some bad things in your life, and this is one of the interesting methods of punishing yourself for past transgressions. That time you made fun of some other frame’s under-the-downtube water bottle position, or slightly high bottom bracket height? Trying to make your own will definitely pay you back for that.

Given that I geek out on other designs even more than usual right now, I love that Ibis has posted photos and some text about the development of the upcoming Ripley 29er frame. What’s profoundly depressing for me in studying what Ibis did isn’t just how amazing their design aesthetic or business seems to be (though they’re all ‘o that), but rather this unsettling notion: I would have kept refining it.

What the hell is wrong with me? Well, it isn’t the eccentric pivots that bother me–they aren’t that surprising to see more than one company now using, even though it’s tough to know what long term durability is going to be like. It’s the clevis, the structure that bolts directly to the shock and pivots off of the swingarm.

I love everything about the Ripley, and I love how Ibis sells and markets their products (they’re about as close to a micro-version of Apple as we get in the bike business), but even great marketing can’t take my eyes off the additional pivots on this frame. Sure, they’re not that big a deal, but why did you go to eccentrics if it tightened up your swingarm movement so much that you had to punt by delinking the shock? It seems even to go against Ibisinian design principles that have always embraced a “simplest design is probably the best” kind of aesthetic to introduce additional moving parts that have to be maintained. And it seems like an afterthought, which is weird. Ibis being Ibis and Dave Weagle being one of the only real thinkers in the entire bike business, they made great lemonade with that clevis by changing how it connects to the shock, which is great, but ask yourself how silly that piece would have looked if they hadn’t done that? You’d just be asking yourself, “Why didn’t they connect the shock directly to the swingarm?” I suspect they didn’t do that because they couldn’t, not because they didn’t want to, and that’s the only thing that bugs me about an otherwise amazing looking new frame.

Now somebody just needs to ride one.

Made in the U.S.A.?

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Nov 072011

One of the criticisms I often hear of high-end bike companies is that all of their frames are made in Taiwan (or, increasingly, China). The assumption here is that production costs in developing countries are so low that brands are outsourcing to drive up their profits and make more money–and that’s usually a pretty good assumption. But as a guy trying to get a prototype frame built, so far it’s been my impression that Taiwan is not the cheapest, but rather the only place to do it.

I hope I’ll be proven wrong, but so far companies in Taiwan, and their trading agents, have proven to be drastically more responsive and interested in building the frame. Stateside builders I’ve talked with either lack resources and need a year or more to get something built, or don’t seem interested in getting back to me. And that sucks. I’d rather build this prototype here. In an ideal world, I’d even like to have options in a fabricator, and get this single frame built in six months.

But what’s become pretty obvious to me is that there’s just not much small-scale manufacturing going on here. That isn’t to say we can’t make things. In a backyard DIY sort of way, we’re still the top of the food chain. We still have enough of a middle class that once upon a time had disposable income for some of us to have small machine shops and painting booths in our garages, and we know how to genuinely create something. But we seem to go straight from “I have a friend who can MIG weld” to “Alcoa,” without all that much in between.

No, we’re more of a “Service Economy,” which means we better hope they keep opening new Starbucks.

At least BikeRumour was showing off some serious hardware that’s U.S. made.

Speaking of the prototype I’ve looking to create, most of the questions I’ve been getting revolve around (pun intended) the lower rocker. Here’s a detail shot:

One of the patented aspects of the design is the position of that lower rocker. Unlike a lot of short lower rocker orientations, this design lets the swingarm attach at the front of the rocker–ahead of where the rocker attaches to the frame. This allows for several things I believe to be very good, but one key characteristic of the design is a 29’er-friendly axle path.

Most people can understand that the larger diameter rear wheel causes clearance issues with the frame–in particular, once a bump force acts on the suspension and moves the rear wheel upward, it doesn’t take long for that arcing big wheel to get really close to the bike’s seat tube. That part’s pretty straightforward. But a 29er’s bottom bracket also sits lower relative to a bike with 26″ wheels. Because of that lower bottom bracket (aka “increased bottom bracket drop”), a totally unladen 29er is a little like a 26″ wheeled bike that’s already partway into its rear travel.

Center of the bottom bracket sits significantly below the axle.

This all means that axle path relative to that bottom bracket shell is critical on a 29er. (In the process of working this out, I looked at Niner’s CVA system, which is a pretty brilliant way to deal with the challenges of the added bottom bracket drop on a 29er.) Getting sufficient travel without having to shove the seat tube forward (shortening the effective length of the rider’s compartment) or pushing wheel out behind the rider with longer chainstays (which can decrease maneuverability and make the bike ride “flat footed”), is a challenge.

After a whole lot of hours testing rocker widths, angles, and orientations, I believe I’ve found an axle path that will let a 29er be as agile as most 26″ wheeled bikes. There was also a very specific effect I wanted to see happen with the swingarm, and I’ll have some more on that later.

Feedback

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Oct 142011

According to WordPress, two people visited my site today based on typing the words “shrunk and riding a dog.” Far be it for me to question Google’s recent amazing third quarter earnings, but I can assure everyone that I’ve never written that particular phrase (ain’t grammatically correct, for one thing, but I checked, just in case).

Ironically, anyone doing an image search for “spotted dick” will legitimately be referred to this:

Heinz Spotted Dick

At any rate, I’ve been writing stuff down here for nearly three months now, and have so far managed to largely avoid blathering all that much about personal things like the suspension design I’m trying to have fabricated. But since leaving Speedgoat in May, getting back to work on the 29er-specific suspension system I patented back in 2010 has become increasingly important to me. I’m currently trying to find someone capable to working with me to create a functional prototype of the design. Tonight I just wanted to include a link to an explanation of the design via the patent page, and ask anyone reading this to please send me any feedback. At this stage I’d really like to gather as many comments, questions, and critiques of the design as possible. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

My direct email is chris@canootervalve.com, and thanks in advance for any questions or feedback you can offer.

Finally Time for Some Little Guy Innovation?

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Sep 262011

Question: You run into the Alike 110 out there? Know anything about it? (Seen at MTBR.com.)

PS Like your FS Design… let me know when the prototype comes about.

Answer: It’s a wild-looking fork, but, unfortunately, that Alike 110 appears to be only a plastic prototype at this point.

Alike 100 Prototype Carbon Linkage Fork

Though rare, parallelogram forks have existed since the original Girvin, but they’ve never been able to get much traction in the market.

Partly, their failures can be attributed to problems with those early designs (wear, shock position, and some minor freakiness related to axle path), and the momentum that telescoping forks developed in those early years. But a lot has changed. The companies that make telescoping forks have all the OEM markets locked up, but that doesn’t explain why garage DIY types haven’t stepped up to bring the strangeness. You’d think a guy with a lathe somewhere in Northern California would have been showing off something similar to this by now. We’re certainly due for some good, old fashioned innovation.

Another Alike 100 Prototype Fork Shot

So this Italian single-sided is still mostly imaginary, but here are a few reasons I think we could actually see something like this soon:

Big Wheels are a Game Changer – The Alike 110 pictured is on a 650b bike, but it’s 29ers that continue to drive a lot of innovation today. As 29ers become increasingly mainstream, they cause more and more people to rethink traditional designs. I’m convinced a big part of previously DH design elements making their way onto XC bikes–things like 15QR and 142mm rear axle spacing–were heavily spurred on by 29ers, which gave most companies the guaranteed additional sales necessary to invest in new things. When it comes to designs, big wheels continue to be prime instigators of change.

Cannondale’s Lefty – It’s been around for a long time now, proving itself a viable alternative and–most importantly–creating a fork (no pun intended) in suspension system development. Small as it is, the Lefty’s ecosystem of hubs makes other single-sided forks possible. Having two legs was one of the things that never made sense about previous linkage forks, but the long term existence of a viable single-sided fork helps make a linkage fork possible.

We Need It – Even if someone only makes three of these things, and the last owner ends up having to modify it to use bigger bearings or something, this kind of wacky stuff used to be part and parcel of mountain bike culture. While you’d be a fool to embrace every piece of ill-conceived garbage we once had to wade through downstairs at Interbike, we probably shouldn’t forget how guys like Keith Bontrager once resorted to the occasional dumpster dive in the name of innovation. Blame mountain bikes “selling out” or blame the reality of the current economy, but thinking outside the box by small companies just isn’t happening the way it once did. Plastic or not, it makes me smile to see out there designs like this fork.

(And thanks for the kind words about the suspension design! Development started way back in the Asylum days, and I’ll keep anyone interested posted here.)