SUSPENSION TAKES HOLD

      Doug Bradbury, mountain bike aluminum frame pioneer from Manitou Springs, was in his garage for many moons, building light and strong suspension forks based on a couple of skewered stacks of undamped elastomer springs. When cutie pie boy wonder, BMX-turned-mountain bike racer, John Tomac, began to race Doug's Manitou forks, heads turned. When, in that same year, both Ned Overend and Greg Herbold won World Championships on Rock Shox forks, the fully rigid mountain bike went from pro level racer to novelty item.
     In that same year, 1990, I took a teaching job at the University of Colorado, moving far from the new wave trail closures in Marin County. One of the first things I did in Boulder was sell a very expensive Italian road bike to finance a complete custom rework of a handmade Manitou suspension fork. I had titanium brake studs, titanium stanchions, carbon titanium steerer tube, and a complete set of titanium bolts custom fabricated for this one fork and found out why NASA and the defense industry paid so much for bolts. Once the fork was finished, it cost me nearly one thousand dollars. I stuck this feathery, meticulous goodie on my Klein Pinnacle and "got acquainted" with the Rockies.
      I, like many others, had become what the bike industry wanted me to be--a diehard consumer of high-tech, high-dollar, boing-boing shit that was going to be obsolete in months. I always had my ear to the ground, memorizing pages of Mountain Bike Action, also known as Mountain Bike Fiction.
     Suspension created a huge bottleneck in the industry. Nobody knew how to build this stuff right and big fish who were very good at supplying copy bikes, sucked at innovation. Most companies were waiting for some small builder to create something to copy, steal or buy out. Some threw money directly into the wind.
     Gary Fisher's small company crumbled under the weight of kicking out the bugs in a floating disc brake that was a must for a promising suspension design created by motorcycle legend, Mert Lawill. The Lawill bike climbed well and descended fast, but it wouldn't stop. Gary's dreams of winning races and selling bikes led to a buy-out by Trek, the same company that had just offered a two-wheeled pogo stick that ejected riders over the handlebars like a catapult. Cannondale threw its hat into the ring, marketing the ugliest, stupidest XC bike of all time, . . . and people actually bought them. Bad designs, noble attempts, and boing-boing freaks ruled the early nineties.
      Things changed slowly. It was again the small builders that got a handle on the issue. Richard Cunningham's Mantis Pro-Floater, Horst Leitner's AMP, and Mountain Cycles' and Brent Foes' rock-solid, long travel, space-cadet monocoques emerged, standing out from the jokers and the clowns.
      In 1993 I bought a Mantis Fro-Floater, spared no expense, building up the frame with the lightest CNC milled American made components and titanium lightening goodies. When at last the bike was built took it out the door of my Pinewood Springs, Colorado home, pushed it up the steepest hill, clicked into the new Shimano SPD clipless pedals (we called them Spuds), pointed the pretty thing downward, and let it fly. The Avocet computer quickly shot to over 50 miles per hour.
     I thought to myself, "This thing feels like a goddamn motorcycle!" But as the 120 degree turn to my house approached faster than I had ever imagined it would, I grabbed a handful of mushy, do-nothing brakes and realized it wasn't going to stop like a motorcycle. I shot by the turn, picked the front end up, banged over a drainage ditch, up an embankment, got airborne (brakes really don't work so hot when you are airborne), and landed hard in my neighbors' yard, coming to a stop in a bush under their living room window.
     When I finally took the Mantis into the mountains up 3500 feet up to Meeker Park, it lead me into temptation on every technical trail section I had walked before. After I got used to the squishy, rubberband rear end wagging like a dog behind me, the bike climbed the steep loose surfaces of the Front Range like it was glued to the ground. It changed directions intuitively and descended like a little buzz bomb. After I installed a brake booster, fine tuned cable lengths, pad, and brake arm angles, it actually stopped. It creaked everywhere, though, and if I hit a diagonal rut, the rear end twisted like plywood. After two weeks of hard riding the rear shock popped like a .22 pistol every time I hit a bump. When I sent it back to the manufacturer, it took a month to fix. The pressed in titanium bottom bracket spindle broke during peak season in Colorado. Hey, I like to ride.
     I gave up on full suspension, sold the Mantis, maxed the credit card on a Titanium Fat Chance, and happily rode this fine hardtail while the industry duked it out to create reliable, worthy full suspension designs, brakes that would stop them and shocks that worked for more than three rides. I watched as manufacturers went through every conceiveable harebrain pivot location and design. The unified rear triangle came and went, then came back again as the I-Drive. Pivots got close tolerance machining, grease fittings, tempered metals, delrin, teflon, and sealed ball and needle bearings. Production costs soared. Many small frame builders folded or were absorbed by the larger companies in the confusion.

SKINNY PEOPLE SELL OUT TO FAT PEOPLE

      While full suspension was being worked out, mountain biking became mainstream. We were fed a steady diet of style and flash, baggy pants for the insecure, anti-chain suck devices for the shifty, and funky disc wheels for the overly endowed wallet. We gobbled up handlebars that cost a hundred bucks, styrofoam skull buckets with hair nets on them for $50, and a neverending flood of candy-ass shoes, dangerous pedals, aftermarket jewelry hubs, headsets, creaking CNC'd cranks. All of this crap was manufactured to satisfy the obsessive feeding frenzy of people like myself.
      It got worse, when the "professional" trainers started telling us how to eat. You know you are really getting reamed when sugar and caffeine are marketed as performance enhancers. There were, and still are, energy bars that taste like chewing gum and cardboard, that turn into tooth-busting bricks in cold weather, energy goos in a tube that taste like the lard and sugar icing on the cake my mom got from the local bakery on my 9th birthday. With the advent of bready cookie-like bars I can now make my own birthday cake on the trail. Just squirt a bunch of chocolate energy snot out of the tube onto an energy cookie clump out of the silver wrapper, and voila, instant chocolate cake, and a lightheaded bellyache just like the one I got on my 9th birthday. Only now, at the age of 54, it is called Type 2 Diabetes.
      Then they started to lie about how the bikes worked. How many companies have you heard say, "Our suspension bike was designed to eliminate bob"? Poor Bob, the unloved fellow. There is one thing I have learned from building, riding and selling really good full suspension mountain bikes over the years--Bob is a fine fellow. Don't worry about Bob. Worry about companies that tell you that their bikes don't bob, then come out with a new bike the following year, designed to, you guessed it, eliminate Bob.