Done and dusted with Mountain Cycle, I was cleaning up my files when I came across a wad of drawing scans I did that defines the design process of the Mountain Cycle San Andreas 2.0; from the period of 2008-2011 I was involved with Mountain Cycle and in 2009 was tasked to design, manage and oversee (the Taiwan based owners chose to manage production and QC themselves) the first new line of frames the company had seen for some years.

The design process used to create such bikes, or products for that matter, is one that for many remains a mystery – it’s understood that somewhere someone does something and at the end a finished product is spat out of a factory but not much more. So rather than bury this away, never to be seen again, I thought some out there might find the whole process interesting, or at very least slightly entertaining.

Industrial Design is the design of, no, not industry but products. The more suitable name for the profession is ‘Product Design’ and for better or worse, it plays a central role in everyone’s everyday life, at least in the developed world. From the spoon you ate your cereal with, to the car (!) that drove you to work and the computer that you are reading this on, a Product Designer has spent more than a few hours to conceive, design and develop the numerous products you have interfaced with so far today. In the world of bicycles, for those companies that invest in design beyond the traditional, it’s no different.

It all starts with a brief.

The brief is completely dependent on the aims of the company and what it’s end goals are for the project in question. In some cases it may be as simple as designing something to fit a certain price point or market, to fill a gap in their line, or it could be far more in depth, tying in all manner of different factors to create what are called ‘masthead products’. For Mountain Cycle, designing the San Andreas 2.0 was to take the bull by the horns and design a bike that not only took on the namesake of it’s legendary predecessor, but which was also the masthead of the company. It was no small task considering the legendary status of the original and I knew no matter what we did, it was going to offend someone somewhere – as is usually the case in such projects where the core customers are emotionally attached to the original design.

2001, The original

The concept. An idea derived from the base criteria.

Even before I begun, I knew that the design was going to be a single pivot (SP). Not only was SP a mainstay of pretty much all previous Mountain Cycle frames but it’s also something I firmly believe is the ideal system for people that ride hard, a lot – it’s simple, effective and easy to maintain (read my thoughts on this here). With this in mind though, I also wanted to introduce a rocker into the system to fine tune the shock’s travel path and ultimately make it more suitable to an air shock.

Lastly, I always thought for an aluminium frame, the BB, swingarm and rocker pivots should all be part of the same central assembly to ensure good long term alignment and stiffness and with these key criteria in place, a rough ‘package’ of datum points was established to start working around as the basis for the design concept.

Early Concept sketch

The simultaneous greatness and failing of the original San Andreas was the Monocoque frame. Failing because monocoque frames generally suffer from a ‘one size fits all’ syndrome, either that or you require tooling for each and every size, tooling which becomes very costly to establish and a real issue to modify or update (pretty much like carbon frames). Add to this, the subframe sizing/multi-position solution employed by the original to work around the single size mainframe really was a little half arsed – nice in theory, not so great in practice as it repositioned the COG (center of gravity) differently on the same wheelbase.

For the new San Andreas, a more traditional arrangement needed to be employed, one that would allow for a relatively easy resizing of the frames while eliminating the need to modify the base tooling. This of course would not be in keeping with the gist of the original and while I knew we would put noses out of joint and offend people, the realities of modern Asian based volume production had to be allowed for – there is little room, or (often) interest, for flexibility or doing things out of the ordinary.

The most logical conclusion was to use a down tube (DT) and then create the feeling of the original monocoque and subframe, elements that defined the San Andreas, via a Top Tube (TT) arrangement – but one that could be trimmed to size. Doing this would be creating something that both took the San Andreas forward but also showed a lineage from the original.

Many have said that this style of design is closer to the older Mountain Cycle Fury of the early 2000′s, but interestingly a little known fact was that the ‘Fury’ frame was devised as a cheaper, easier to produce, San Andreas; I always have felt that the Fury should have been called something closer to San Andreas, SA 1.5 maybe, rather than Fury, making the continuation of the marquee over time easier. Looking at the Fury frame, one also realises that as a design it’s rather efficient so designing something in the way that was being looked at, but NOT be a new Fury, was not an easy ask.

Once the idea of a monocoque style ‘TT’ was settled on, the job was to design and define the form of the tube itself, as this was going to become the focus of the frame. By this stage, Sotto Group was involved to provide an engineering and suspension solution, so trading back and forth, we came up with the concept of passing the shock though the ‘TT’ via what became known as the ‘Shock Tunnel’. Doing this allowed a form to be created that was smooth and seamless, not broken or forced forward as would have been the case if the ‘TT’ were to be interrupted, or not, by the shock.

Having Sotto on board also meant we could employ a SP suspension system they had been working on that perfectly matched what I had originally been thinking about; but took the concept to the next level. The ‘Turntable’ system, as it came to be known, fine tunes the shock path and rate through a rocker that revolves around a patent pivot system. The net result of this was each bike designed to use the Turntable system could be fine tuned to achieve maximum effectiveness from the suspension, all the while being anchored in a central ‘block’ as I had envisaged.

With the core foundations now set in place, over a period of a month or so, the design and development of the frame took shape.

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As can be seen, the original designs for the TT were a lot more ‘crisp’ with a far more developed aesthetic. The original design would have seen the whole ‘TT’ formed as a single piece through hydraulic pressure forming, also known as ‘hydroforming’. Unfortunately, the owners of Mountain Cycle ultimately chose not to make the spend on the initial tooling cost to create the hydroforming dies for budget reasons, so we elected to making the tube through the more basic monocoquue process of pressing two half shells and welding down the centre – the same way the original frame was made 20 years earlier. The cost savings using this method ultimately were marginal, as the increased amount of time required to set up the initial moulds, increased labour content, complex welding jigs, seam welding and resulting defect rate ultimately would outweigh the initial tooling investment of hydroforming over the medium to long term.

It was in moving to the monocoque process, that much of the ‘crisp’ detailing was lost from the tube; the pressing methods utilised to create the half shells are unable to achieve the finer level of detailing able to be gained through hydroforming. As a result, the final design ended up being much softer than originally conceived.

Once the from and overall mechanics had been decided and agreed on, Sotto built the frame in 3D via software called ProEngineer. As Sotto was to work directly with the factory in Taiwan for the pilot run process and the initial tooling set up etc., they undertook all the 3D work, something quite often undertaken by the Product Designer who then passes over to the engineer to refine and engineer further. Finally, once the frame was fully realised in 3D, we could assess the design more comprehensively and make alterations and amendments as needed.

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After the final round of refinements were translated back into 3D and everyone was happy, the process began to tool up for prototyping and initial production.

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While several steps both Sotto and myself deemed essential prior to actually starting on tooling and production starting were skipped, and as I had made the call to CNC all of the required parts for the initial runs (as opposed to going straight into costly and time intensive forging tooling as the factory would have preferred), pretty much everything worked out first time around with minimal of fuss (luckily); only a few minor changes had to be made, requiring new CNC parts, not modified or even new forging tooling, which would have taken months to do.

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As the design team, we knew the end result could have been better in several areas but overall we all felt the end result is pretty damn good; the aims to create a design that could sit along side the original, as its successor, were met.

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Following on from the San Andreas design, I kept the to the same thinking to create a ‘family’ and we very quickly progressed to design the Zen II, a scaled back and far more traditional design and then go on to produce the Shockwave Two DH frame, a visually far more aggressive version of the San Andreas 2.0 and one intentionally at odds with the current crop of ‘swoopy’ designs. Again, the use of hydroforming to form the Shockwave TT, rather than the monocoque method, would have produced a for more refined design but the end result, all felt, produced the desired results.

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Overall the designs of both the San Andreas and Shockwave frames have polarised people, in a market that I personally feel is driven by a ‘chasing one’s own tail’ mentality. I wrote an article about this some time back, so won’t repeat it here but no one on the team is unhappy with the end results. Ultimately, we all felt the new bikes represent what Mountain Cycle stands for as a brand perfectly – bulldog, industrial machines for riders first. And that’s the job of good design – to embody what a brand stands for.

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As anyone who has done it will tell you, doing a FS frame is fraught with issues, not so much the actual making but more the suspension – and not because of what suspension but because of all the shit brandied about clueless marketing departments in order to convince people to by the ALL NEW frame, that’s really no better than last year’s ALL NEW frame.

Doing some looking around, I came across an interesting blog post:

“…The single pivot suspension is a compromise without a doubt. However, sometimes things that look great in theory don’t translate as well on trails and sometimes things that look crap in theory turns out to be a pleasant surprise.”

This pretty much sums up the reality from where I’ve seen it for the past 10 years. Sure, on paper so many new suspension designs seem and are great but when you get them on the trail, they all sort of balance out – especially when you consider how poorly the large majority of bikes are set up. Add to this that in today’s market, where shock units have finally matured to do what they should in the way they should, and that there is really no such thing as a bad bike anymore, then all the hype about the latest and greatest suspension design is pretty much that, hype. In many ways I see it as academic masturbation enjoyed mostly by magazine writers, marketing departments and those that talk more than they ride – I’ve had my arse handed to me by people on bikes ‘inferior’ to mine many times.

Can you imagine if the automotive world had as many different variations of suspension that the mountain bike world does?

So sure, you can call me an arse and that that’s fine by me. But if I’m wrong, then why do you still see people riding, say Mountain Cycle frames that are some 20 years old in design and yet they claim that the bikes are still great. Same with the FSR suspension etc. etc. In so many ways, it’s not the bike that’s the issue it’s more the owner’s own doing or worse, perception – if they think the bike’s a dog, then it is, regardless of what you might say or suggest and the only remedy is a newer, ‘better’ bike.

Read the whole rather interesting post here

The basis for the design was simple enough, anyone who has had anything to do with motorcycles would understand it. The role of a frame, or chassis, is to connect the head tube to the rear wheel in the stiffest possible manner. On a bicycle you have to throw the bottom bracket into that, through which an unbalanced power delivery gets chucked at the frame. For a loooong time the only, and still the best, way to do that is with what is called a double triangle, aka, the everyday bike frame. This design is strength and simplicity at its best and allows for weights to be as low as possible and yet stay very strong. Through careful tube selection, a good builder can fine tune the frame for a light, smooth, silky ride.

The wobble comes when suddenly the rear wheel is suspended and needs to move. Throwing suspension into the equation means that fine tuning the frame is far less important, as suspension now handles a lot of what was trying to be done with a rigid structure – take out fatigue inducing bumps and frequencies. Reisinger solved this problem by throwing away the tried and tested double triangle, and tubes for that matter, and connected the lot through a pressed monocoque frame. Doing this allowed for the frame to be engineered to be tortionally rigid, have a wide, thus stiff, single pivot point for the swing arm and connect the head tube to the bottom bracket in one ‘single’ piece. For the rear end and right out of the moto world, a monocoque style swing arm swept up and over the cranks, thus allowing for a short chainstay length, and attached the rear wheel to the frame the simplest and stiffest manner possible. As an upside, it also allowed a direct and very simple connection of the shock to the frame. Stripped, the San Andreas could be a frame for a small motorcycle.

The end result of this was a frame that unlike any before it, and many after, was insanely stiff, strong, highly responsive and light. When you think that Reisinger then attached his own ‘Pro Stop’ disc brakes (with floating rotor) and upside down forks, you can see that even now, let alone 1991 when he debut the frame at Interbike, the Mountain Cycle San Andreas really was a piece of mountain biking design brilliance.

Today, the San Andreas still manages to turn heads in amongst the river of designs that it inspired, yet none have endured in the way that it has, 20 years on. If it were a car or a motorcycle, it would be considered a classic and while one will find the bike in the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, not many realise that there are people out there who either are looking for or are still running San Andreas frames in various incarnations; it’s rare to find a rider who had one and moved it on not later regret the decision. The bike has a mystic appeal and once you get used to its personality, you won’t want to part with it.

Personally I have had three San Andreas’ over the years. In 1993 I bought my first, which had the 2″ travel elastomer rear shock and 1 1/4″ headset. It was one of the first of the production bikes to come out of the California based Mountain Cycle. I’ll never forget my first ride on it, equipped with canti brakes and down steep fire trails that I knew so well on my steel GT. The bike picked up so much speed and was so direct in its response that, cutting the lines I took with the GT only got me into increasingly larger amounts of trouble until I had to stop, shaking. Welcome to the brave new world. I rode that bike over everything, from fire trails to steep goat track climbs up the sides of mountains, to me it defined what a mountain bike should be.

San Andreas ‘DNA’. Designed by Kenisis, it had (has) it’s issues and did the original no favours…

In ’96 I let the frame go and moved to all sorts of other bikes until, in ’05, I bought another after the custom bike I had waited months for to arrive turned out to be a total dud and was promptly sent back. The second San Andreas was from the ‘new’ Mountain Cycle, owned by Kinesis and I bought it just as Mountain Cycle was closing its doors. The ‘Classic’, as it was then being called, had a few refinements but by in large it was the same frame as my ’93 model. More travel, which yielded a skyscraper of a bottom bracket and with the VPS shock/head angle adjustment system, this was what ended up being the final production frame. As a quick side note, Kinesis also made a new San Andreas it called the ‘DNA’… which ended up being a marketing disaster as it was a XC and light AM design being pushed to Free Ride and DH. Net result? The DNA broke…. lots. Anyway, I threw a Rholoff and a Pushed Fox shock on my ‘Classic’ and it once again became the ultimate trail bike – simple and almost maintenance free. Several years later though it was stolen from my garage and yes, I was truly pissed off as Mountain Cycle had since vanished from the scene and after nearly 20 years, the San Andreas was no longer in production.

In late ’07 I managed by sheer fluke to find an old 2000 San Andreas front end at local legend repair shop [Gripsport.com.au] and had mated it to the spare ’03 rear end I had laying around (don’t ask); the rear end from the old frame was snapped clean in half. The chop job was perfect though and one would never know, unless they were well versed in the various incarnations of the frame. The older frame lacked the VPS system, which to me was a good thing as Kinisis did a bang-up job in crap engineering, which saw many of the machined VPS blocks peel off the frame along with the seat towers. Mine did. Fifteen years on I was once again back on board what I still consider one of the best MTB frames ever made.

The question though is ‘does the old school set up cope with the added travel and new school kit hanging from it?’ In Robert Reisinger’s words:

“… the original SA was designed with 2″ travel front and rear, but as travel grew so did the acceptable BB heights over the years and the SA’s original frame was modified to provide more travel with a higher BB too. However, as it got higher, it became more of a design issue that we addressed in different ways over the years, however a new re-design of the frame was always on the books to do but never found the time. That being said, as components changed too, with smaller chain rings, it made the problems of performance even worse, so we started to incorporate the changes into the new frames.

The SA, in my opinion, needs a re-design… “

g

End Pt 1

Note:

It should be known that G does work for Mountain Cycle in the role of design director (his blog: mag100.com). That said, the above article reflects what has been a long time relationship with the San Andreas and indeed, the current version was assembled prior to signing on with Mountain Cycle. G’s opinion, as well as that of Mountain Cycle, is that the San Andreas can teach us all that design, when done well, does not age.

So when you find a company that does not sell on the cool but on something that is a little more dull but a whole lot more important, you have to take notice.

POC is one such company.

Based in Sweeden, the country that brings you the world’s safest car, POC states that its founding mission was not the be ‘totally rad and gnarley dude’, but – “POC is a Swedish company, built on a strong mission; to do everything we can to possibly save lives and to reduce consequences of accidents, for gravity sports athletes, by developing and renewing what personal protection is all about. POC has in many ways already set a new standard when it comes to technical solutions, construction, material combinations and engineering, with patented solutions, to increase the degree of protection.”

Designing a range of products for the snow and bike sports markets, POC’s kit, at least at first glance, is subdued yet rater appealing. The safety aspect/specialist product is also very attractive, especially as one gets a that little older and starts to think about sich things a little more seriously. Digging deeper, a fair amount of thought has been given to the line, more than the cursory ‘yea cool’ that seems to be the most many products in the MTB market seem to get these days; the POC [Index Flow] glove is interesting, especially if you’re like me and have a glove fetish (goes hand in hand (boom tish!) with my pack fetish) and are always looking for that perfect glove.

POC is available in most countries, though it’s hard to say if the full line will be found everywhere which is a pity as their online store will not sell to you if there is someone selling in your locale.

Regardless, check out the POC site, a painfully slow all Flash number, to gain a better appreciation of what POC does. [POC SPORTS]