At the weekend I made the long journey home to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday. Within minutes of arriving I had one of those ‘I know you’ moments when I came face to with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. Admittedly I had the upper hand, I was a man the last time he’d seen me some twenty years ago. It took a few seconds for the penny to drop, but within minutes normal service was resumed. While we chatted, actually shouted in each others ears over the banging club tunes, he reminded me of my past life, and something I was close to forgetting. I was the guy behind Guyzer Custom Cycles and there was a bike I’d built in bike shop in Ashburton, Big Peaks.
To say it piqued my interest is a bit of an understatement. Back in the 90’s, when I was young and hopeful I had a crack at making my living as a frame builder. I did all right for a while, building anything the customer wanted, but my dream was to make full suspension bikes. I only built three. A prototype, one for a friend as a loss leader, and one I’ve still got slowly going rusty in my cellar. By power of intuition alone I knew which one it was in Big Peaks. Fair enough, it was a 50/50 guess, but I knew it would be the first full sus bike I built, a creation I nicknamed The Nodding Donkey.
Suspension was one of my obsessions. It had been a thing with me since I was a small kid. I grew up on a farm and I studied the rudimentary suspension systems on tractors and trailers, figuring out how all four wheels were kept on the ground. I loved Lego, and Lego taught me a lot about the way things worked as I replicated those simple articulated designs before moving on to sprung independent systems.
Suspension was very new in the world of bicycles at the time with new ideas popping up in every magazine I opened. As soon as I could I was designing suspension systems of my own. I got very close to coming up with something very special with that first bike, but missed by a whisker. Back then there were two main philosophies, swinging arms and unified rear triangles. Swing arms were preferred by the riders who were more descent minded, while the cross country brigade preferred URT bikes, as they were believed to be more efficient. I fell into the XC camp so went down the URT road, but I wanted to do away with ‘stand up lock-out’ and the variance in seat height.
After much head scratching, sketching and playing with my Lego, I realised something I thought was truly fantastic. By using two levers I could put the pivot point anywhere I wanted. So I set to work and built my virtual pivot point bike. But I made an enormous cock up.
Most URT bikes had a high pivots. They were great when you were sitting down pedalling, but when you stood up the suspension effectively locked out. I was a firm believer in the unified rear triangle philosophy, but I didn’t like that lock out. I knew that any suspension systems efficiency was dependent on it’s pivot point and you had to find ‘The Sweet Spot’ between lockout and pedal induced bob. There’s was a lot of debate about where that point should be, and for my prototype I thought the bottom bracket axle was the place to put it. For one, if the swing arm rotated about the BB you wouldn’t get any of the stand up lock-out associated with URT bikes, or any variance in seat height. I also thought that because it was a URT bike there wouldn’t be any torque induced pedal bob, wrong!
I was on a high. I thought I was going to change the world of mountain biking and make my fortune. I thought my name would be uttered alongside Gary Fisher, Joe Murray, Tom Ritchey and Joe Breeze as a pioneer of Mountain biking!
I excitedly got to work and built my bike. For a bike of the day it was a long travel beauty with looks to kill. I lavished no expense on it with nothing but top end kit. There was 100mm of travel at the back and at the front it had Amp B3 forks supplying a whopping 75mm of travel achieved through a parallelogram linkage. It had an XT drive train, Specialized S-Works wheel set, Syncros seat post and Control Tech bars and Campagnolo Record breaks. It was with great anticipation that I took it out for it’s first ride…
…and it rode like a dog. Every pedal stroke had the back end bobbing up and down like an oil well pump, hence the nick name, The Nodding Donkey. At first I was convinced it was just down to spring rates and damping. I set about tinkering with the shock set up, trying to tune it out, but nothing I did would stop the bob.
In the end I gave and went back to the drawing board. Being a category one idiot I abandoned my virtual pivot point design and basically ripped off Ibis’s Sweet Spot instead. I built a very nice URT bike that’s rusting in my cellar to this day.
Now here’s the thing, seeing The Nodding Donkey has got my thinking, not to mention kicking myself for making some bad decisions, I was onto something and I gave it up far to easily. And I guess that’s the difference between success and failure, that dogged determination to keep plugging away at something. It might have been a good idea but history has proved the URT bike to be an evolutionary dead end. They died a death and went the way of the penny farthing. Even so there’s that little voice in my head whispering what if.
My Sweet Spot rip off is going to get pulled out of the cellar and restored to a ride-able state, it shouldn’t take much. I will take it out and ride it, and it will turn a few heads, I might even race it. But this glimpse of my past life as a frame builder has been rekindled that dream of what could have been, in much the same way I had to make a return to racing, like I have to write this rubbish nobody reads. My time in the world bikes is not done.
If I could get my hands on a T.I.G. welder and a workshop…
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Lulu-R's Cycling Times 