Editor’s Note: Chris Currie has been in the industry for years, many of which he’s spent quietly designing, patenting and slowly but surely developing his own full suspension platform. In this new series, he’ll give us a peek inside the process of creating something new, the myriad ways to bring it to market and the challenges of it all. Without further ado, here’s Chris:
Eighteen years ago, I started an online bike shop called Speedgoat out of an old one-room schoolhouse in the mountains of Southwestern PA. I didn’t have “start-up capital,” a background in web development, or a business degree. All I really had was an obsession with bikes and a wife who was just crazy enough to go along with me. For fourteen years we worked with the best companies in the bike business, building up thousands of custom bikes for riders around the world. We knew the names of our customers’ dogs, even if the customers lived thousands of miles away. It was that kind of business.
In 2010 I sold the company to people I thought could take it to the next level, but they were a trainwreck. Frustrated with the new owners, I left in 2011. In the years since, I moved west to manage sales, marketing, and customer service for Velotech in Portland, Oregon, while moonlighting for Stan’s NoTubes, where I’m now Creative Director. Through it all, one personal project that started at Speedgoat ten years ago has stayed with me. I had an idea for a bike.
Since 2004, I’ve been quietly developing an entirely new suspension platform. The original idea started innocently enough, but got out of control pretty quickly. I ended up teaching myself Solidworks to be able to draw and dimension what I was trying to visualize in my head. I applied for a patent in 2007 when the numbers started telling me this could be something special, and was granted a patent for the design in 2010. Until you have a rolling prototype, you have nothing, so I didn’t make a big deal about any of this, but somehow the design started to earn a bit of an underground following among engineers and product managers. In 2011, I was in such a low place after leaving Speedgoat that I started writing about the design on a blog I’d started. A few early drawings made their way around the interwebs, and I started to hear from people in the industry. They were getting it. They could see what I was trying to do, and there were a lot of questions about licensing and what I was going to do next, some from people I respected very much. One day I sat down, re-read my own patent online, and started opening files I hadn’t touched since the whole company sale debacle. I had no idea how to make a proof-of-concept bike, but I knew that’s what I had to do.
Today I have six of those bikes sitting in my garage (my wife is still extremely understanding). The current prototype has 160mm of rear travel (6.3″) and is built on 27.5″ wheels. It has a 66º head tube angle when used with a 160mm travel fork, but it’s designed around a straight 1.5″ head tube, so it accepts AngleSets and Works headsets with tapered forks, making the full HT angle range 64-68º. Seat tube angle is 74º. Axle path is one of the special things about the design, and it lets me keep the chainstays to 429mm (16.9″) with plenty of clearance for 2.4″ tires.
The bottom bracket height is adjustable with a chip system built into the lower shock mount, and the frame uses an 73mm English bottom bracket. I had an idea for a PF30 system that wouldn’t creak, but at some point it just didn’t make sense to deny the superiority of good ol’ English threaded bottom brackets (the worst part was admitting my friend, Jason, had been right from the start).
Dropouts are set for 142mm spacing but are modular, because there are no standards any more. Prepare to be boosted. The frame has a removable ISCG tab and can accommodate a front derailleur, if you really want to do something like that.
The current bike is really just a test bed for suspension technology, though. That’s my patent, and that’s what stands out to anyone who rides the bike. Back in 2005, I made an absurd wish list of performance criteria that included obvious things like chainstay length and axle path, but also more esoteric details about pivot point locations for manufacturing precision, leverage ratio adjustability, and shock placement (wasn’t allowed to mount in the center of the downtube, because I’m convinced that leads to really heavy, reinforced downtubes). I ended up designing the suspension to work with just about any shock orientation, though.
But one performance criteria set the tone for the whole system: The bike wasn’t allowed to bob at all on the climbs, even in a shock’s ‘descend’ mode. I mean no tiny pulse at the rocker, no subtle cable movement: zero. If you were under power, only bumps could make the suspension work. But -and this was the stupid “cake and eat it, too” part- you also had to be able to compress the suspension just by standing beside the bike and pressing down with one hand. I’ve ridden a lot of bikes that pedal great, but go jackhammer on you when you really need them to work. I’ve also ridden a lot of bikes that just don’t pedal well. Based on what I was seeing with instant center behavior and axle path on the computer, I thought this design had the potential to balance pedaling and suspension in a very different way. And it does.
I don’t come from an engineering background, but being stupid’s never stopped me before. I wasn’t a web developer when I created one of the first online custom bike configurators at Speedgoat, either. I’d be the first to say I have “fixation issues.” I have this natural gift for making my life completely unbearable. There’s probably a gene that keeps people from obsessing about ideas until they’ve stopped sleeping and wrecked their health. I don’t think I have that gene.
Back in 2005, the original business part of the idea was much simpler: develop a less expensive private-label bike as a compliment to Speedgoat’s high-end brands. The sensible thing to do would’ve been to pick up an open mold hardtail from Taiwan or China -just point to a picture in a catalog and move on to thinking about paint jobs- but I went down the rabbit hole. I’d been around to see some of the first suspension systems used on bicycles, and I’d spent so much time building and riding great bikes from Santa Cruz, Titus (and later Pivot), Niner, Intense, you name it, that I just couldn’t stop thinking about suspension systems. I’d work a fourteen-hour day at Speedgoat, then doodle pivot locations on pieces of scrap paper until the small hours of the morning. I started to see what really went into these designs, thought processes of brilliant guys like Joe Graney, Chris Cocalis, Dave Weagle, the ingenious ways Steve Domahidy and Chris Sugai were dealing with bottom-bracket drop issues on 29ers. One of the best things about trying to design something new was learning to really see what was already in front of me, the intent in other people’s designs. That’s when the insane wish list started.
In 2012, I started working with fabrication places both in the U.S. and Taiwan to create the current test mules. I worked with an engineer at Zen in Portland to make sure I had usable drawings and was accounting for all the components out there. After all, it’s nice to have cranksets that rotate and other basics. I hoped to keep fabrication in the U.S. because I thought that made more sense for prototypes, but Zen was really swamped, and no one had the time to take on the project, or even really estimate how many months it would be before they could. I ended up having to go to Taiwan, where I could get an estimated completion date.
